Without a doubt, the hardest part of being a manager is firing a team member. You don’t really hear that word a lot these days - “FIRING”- it sounds so harsh. I think we feel better about ourselves when we use phrases like “exiting the business” or “letting people go”. In his awesome book “Disrupted” Dan Lyons recalls how Hub Spot used the term “Graduation” to refer to terminations. On the one hand, I find this comical, and on the other hand I find it offensive in the way it sugar coats such a terrible thing.

Whatever words you use to describe it, firing a person is tough. And, as tough as it is for you as the manager, its 100X tougher for the employee being terminated. Your team members have families, mortgages, reputations. The impact of firing someone persists for decades. It sits like a stain on the resume and needs to be explained away at every job interview for years to come. It cuts at a person’s confidence and takes a long time to bounce back from. If it wasn’t obvious already, firing someone needs to be taken very seriously.

I’ve written several blogs about firing employees. I highly recommend reading these if you haven’t already. Here are a couple of my favorites:

Over the years I’ve battled with how to know whether to fire someone or to give them more time to develop. Ultimately, for me, it comes down to only one thing. That’s what we’re going to cover this week.

The impact of firing someone can’t be overstated. It is not to be taken lightly and thankfully most managers don’t. But the impact of NOT firing someone can also be significant. The culture of a team can turn toxic when strong performers see incompetent or ineffective team members getting a free ride. It’s even worse when mean spirited and unethical behavior is allowed to go unchecked. Way too many managers, in my opinion, let the fear of firing trick them into carrying people they shouldn’t. It’s just so much easier NOT to fire someone … at least in the short run. But as much as I loathe the idea of having to fire people, I’m even more fearful of the repercussions of not firing people who need to leave.

Over the years, I’ve battled with these hard questions as so many of you have. And ultimately I’ve distilled my decision-making process down to one fundamental question. When I’m struggling with the idea, when I’m weighing the pros and cons, I ask myself this:

“Do I still believe in this person?”

That probably seems like an over simplification. Maybe even a tiny bit disappointing for some of you who have read this far expecting something a little more novel. But let me explain in a bit more detail how I got here. If I “believe” a staff member will ultimately get to the performance level they need to be at, AND they are a good, positive person on the team, I will choose to continue investing in their development just about every time.

I don’t ever want to be one of those managers who turns on his team. I want team members to feel inspired and challenged to push themselves, but comfortable that if they do the right things they’re not going to be surprised one day with a termination. That’s the magic formula in my opinion. What I don’t want, is to create an environment where employees are paranoid and worried all the time. No one can be creative and perform well in those circumstances. But I also don’t want an environment of complacency, where team members feel there are no repercussions for low effort, questionable judgement and poor performance. As managers, we need to strike the perfect balance.

Here are some indicators that help me answer the question – Do I still believe in this person?

Do they care? And are they giving 100%?

How much a person is committed to being great has a major bearing on whether or not I would consider firing them. If a person is giving maximum effort and truly cares about their performance, I will find every possible reason to continue investing in their development. It might take longer than we’d originally hoped, but with that kind of effort, there is a high probability the team member will ultimately reach the level required. On the other hand, if a person isn’t giving 100%, my attitude flips completely. In fact, I’d be more likely to fire someone operating at 75% of the required performance level who is giving a weak effort than someone operating at 25% of the required performance level who is giving a strong effort.

I want to invest in people who care and I don’t want to be in business with people who don’t.

Is there a functional skills gap or a moral/personal gap?

Gaps in functional skills can be closed with coaching and training. Personal gaps, like morals and ethics, tend never to close. Before I fire someone, I ask myself which one I’m dealing with. If it’s a skills deficiency, I look for reasons to keep the person and find opportunities for them to develop further and faster. If it’s a moral deficiency I immediately move towards termination.

You may argue that we are all developing as humans and that questionable morals at one time in life is not deterministic of the future. You may argue that by bailing at the first sign of ethical deficiency, I’m giving up too soon. It’s possible you’re right on some level. The truth is I like the person I am more now than I did 20 years ago. I have evolved as we all do. But as a manager, I just don’t think it’s worth putting it to chance. Every minute you endorse a staff member with questionable morals or a mean-spirited demeanor, you send a very bad message to your team. Your team can turn in an instant if you’re observed to be supporting this type of behavior.

I want to be in business with good people. I want to build a team full of nice human beings. For me, the factor that most determines my day to day happiness at work is the quality of people I’m with. I’m much more likely to invest in a person a little longer if they’re genuinely kind and good. Maybe this is obvious to you. But if it were obvious to all managers, the complexion of many companies would change considerably.

Can I trust them or am I afraid of being embarrassed?

There is a difference between a person who is struggling to perform and a person who is struggling to perform AND you can’t trust. It’s important for me to differentiate the two. Some team members are challenged to perform to expectations but demonstrate the judgement to protect against big mistakes and embarrassing situations. They’ll make sure to review materials before a big presentation. They’ll ask a lot of questions and double and triple check all work. They’re conscious of the gap that exists and take precautions to mitigate it. On the other hand, there are employees who aren’t meeting the required performance level but are also reckless. They’re confident without reason. They charge forward. They make unilateral decisions. They present low quality work without review. They make you feel like there is a landmine hiding around every corner.

If an employee is struggling but acknowledges the gap and has good judgement, I’m very likely to support them for some time. If an employee is struggling but is also reckless, I will tend to move quickly to termination.

Are they making any progress at all?

This last point is about finding evidence to justify your belief. Are there signs that prove they are making progress. Even something small. If there is some evidence of improvement, I’m very likely to continue believing in a team member. It may take months or quarters or even years to reach the goal, but if progress is taking place, I’m inclined to stay invested. On the other hand, if we’ve been talking about performance improvement for months and we can’t honestly point to any progress, I’m much more likely to move towards termination.

I’m not an expert in firing people. I’m not sure any of us wants to be. I’ve made no secret in my blogs about how much it affects me emotionally. I don’t sleep well leading up to a termination. I worry about it. I search for reasons to justify not doing it. I think that is just the nature of being human. But over the course of my career I’ve had to develop an objective framework for making these types of decisions so I can build the best teams possible. And, as much as I hate to do it, I’ve found the questions in this post to help me know when to continue investing and when to make the hardest decision a manager faces. I’d love to hear your experiences and approaches to making these hard choices. Let me know in the comments.

The fundamental premise behind the 30 60 90 Day Plan does not change no matter what role you’re in or hoping to be in. The purpose of the 30 60 90 Day Plan is widely misunderstood. It has nothing to do with helping you “get up to speed” or “hit the ground running” and everything to do with aligning your boss and management team to a definition and framework for success.

The 30 60 90 Day Plan is designed so your hiring will be declared an unequivocal success after 3 months by the people who matter most to your career. It’s designed to guarantee the success of the major projects you take on. It’s not about making sure you focus on learning or training or any of the other misinformation out there. No one cares about that. The purpose of the 30 60 90 Day Plan is to set the foundation for your career advancement.

If you haven't read my original article on 30 60 90 day plans, you can check it out here. This one is about taking you plan to the next level, especially if you're in sales or management.

My 30 60 90 Day Plan Templates have been downloaded over 60,000 times. If you want to skip to the template you can grab one here.

While the basic goal of all 30 60 90 Day Plans is the same, you can and should customize your approach based on the situation you’re in and the role you hold or would like to hold. I’ve given some advice below on how to customize your plan for Sales positions and Management roles. If either of these sounds like you, keep reading.

The 30 60 90 Day Plan for Sales

The 30 60 90 Day Plan is critical for sales. In the interview process it can help you land the job. And once you have the job it can help you build a reputation as a smart and savvy sales executive. It’s about demonstrating that you understand how to build and execute a sales plan for a territory.

Here are three quick tips to help you build a great 30 60 90 Day Plan for Sales:

Define the Target

If you want to differentiate yourself from other candidates applying for a sales job, or just to impress your boss with your approach to planning a sales territory, you must start by defining your target with precision. Most reps and sales managers don’t take this seriously enough and aren’t scientific in their approach to identifying the “perfect customer”. My recommendation is to spend the first phase of your sales 30 60 90 Day Plan on defining your highest value target customers.

Show the Model

The difference between average sales professionals and exceptional ones is often the model they use to attack a territory or quota. Many people take a “best effort” approach. They rely on salesmanship and intuition to hit a number. While that may work some of the time, it’s not a strategy that is going to set you apart from others. My recommendation is to spend the second phase of your 30 60 90 Day Plan on dissecting your quota and building a model that shows exactly how you’re going to hit it.

Demonstrate your Approach

This is where you need to combine the art and science of sales. Now that you’ve show you can quantify your target and model your business, you need to demonstrate you the art form of sales. My recommendation is to spend the last phase of your 30 60 90 Day Plan showing the tactics you’re going to use to build pipeline and develop customers. If you do this effectively, your boss or future boss will know you have everything it takes to be an effective sales professional.

If you want my ready-to-use 30 60 90 Day Plan Template designed specifically for sales, you can download it here.

The 30 60 90 Day Plan for Managers and Executives

It’s very difficult to be successful as a manager if you haven’t mastered the 30 60 90 Day Plan. In the interview process it will differentiate you from other candidates. And once you have the job it can help you build a reputation as a seasoned, thoughtful executive. When done correctly it will demonstrate that you can think logically about how to build a team and attack a management problem.

Here are three quick tips to help you build a great 30 60 90 Day Plan for Management roles:

The Situational Assessment

All great manager’s start by performing a situational audit or assessment. The 30 60 90 Day Plan is no different. Without this context, you run the risk of being perceived as an activity based, immature manager. My recommendation in the first phase of the plan is to focus on demonstrating how you’ll gain a solid understanding of the business situation and competencies of your team.

The Strategic Initiatives Plan

Now that you’ve completed a situational assessment, you need showcase your ability to build a focused plan that addresses top tier initiatives. One thing that distinguishes average managers and great managers is the ability to focus on the most important issues only. My recommendation is to spend the second part of your plan describing how you’ll build a plan that addresses the most prominent opportunities and gaps.

The Management Dashboard

The last thing you must focus on in your 30 60 90 Day Plan as a manager or executive is the management and measurement framework. There is no point in describing a strategic initiatives plan if you aren’t able to measure it. My recommendation is to focus the final phase of your 30 60 90 Day Plan on providing a KPI dashboard or performance scorecard to measure the success of your strategic initiatives.

My ready-to-use 30 60 90 Day Plan Template designed for managers and executives has all of this built already with tons of extra content from my generic plan template. You can download it here.

I hope my templates are helpful for you. And if you don’t feel like grabbing one, I hope these tips will make it a bit easier next time you need to build a 30 60 90 Day Plan.

The role of Manager is not finite. It moves. What your team needs from you, what the company needs from you, shifts in accordance to the conditions of the market, the economy, the business context. Too many managers, in my opinion, have only one gear. Aggressive managers. Directors. Facilitators. Micromanagers. Cheerleaders. Most managers have one approach and stick to it in every scenario and at every company.

The best managers, by contrast, begin every day and every situation with an assessment of what is required, and morph into that role until it is no longer optimal. If the team is seasoned and the company is growing, the best managers may try to amplify and find leverage by decentralizing control. If the team is inexperienced or the company is in flux, the best managers may lean more towards directing and teaching and coaching.

Today I’m going to focus on how the best managers lead during times of constant change. I’m going to describe 5 traits a manager should adopt to give a team the best chance for success when times are turbulent.

What your team needs from you as their manager changes depending on the context you’re in. When your company is changing rapidly, or the business conditions are in flux, your team has significantly different needs than when everything is calm and predictable. People struggle with change. We all do, to one extent or another. On the outside, we talk about embracing change and that all change leads to opportunity, but on the inside, none of us is unaffected by the uncertainty of it all.

I have had the good fortune, like many of you, to have worked in my fair share of highly variable business environments: Acquisitions, bankruptcies, hyper growth, layoffs, restructuring. What I’ve discovered is that the role my team needs me to play as a leader changes depending on the situation we’re in.

Here are 5 roles I try to emphasize when leading a team through times of change and turbulence.

1. Purpose Provider

When things are crazy, it’s helpful to remind yourself and your team about your fundamental purpose. The wilder things get, the more frequently you need to call it out. I recall a recent team I managed, which was going through a major re-organization, where I started our weekly meeting for 6 months with a reminder of our mission, purpose and top goals. Things were so hectic the situation demanded it. Looking back on that time, I can see how necessary it was. That little reminder each week (even for me), gave us a brief reset before jumping back into the chaos. Eventually we moved through it.

My recommendation to managers is to find more opportunities to remind your team of their purpose and mission when things get crazy. Purpose, above all else, is the source for engagement and motivation in the workplace. It may feel awkward at first to recite your purpose and mission and goals all the time, but you’ll find it to be a useful reset and refocus when you need it most.

2. Communication Facilitator

During turbulent times, when team members are coming and going, new people and groups are being introduced, communication inevitably breaks down. When people stop talking, all the fears and pitfalls associated with change emerge in force. In my experience, the role of a manager during periods of change needs to evolve from encouraging communication to brokering communication. Instead of just espousing the virtues of collaboration, you need to force it to happen. There are just too many forces working against effective communication when change is happening to leave it to chance.

My recommendation to managers is to become more active as brokers of communication in periods of change. Bring groups together, change where people sit, expand your meetings, add daily standups. Take unnatural actions to force more communication to occur.

3. Ruthless Prioritizer

When new variables are constantly being introduced at work, it gets harder for a team to prioritize. It’s difficult to know where the focus should be when so much has changed. New people are involved, new business concepts, new market conditions, new management. The more things change, the harder it is to make prioritization decisions on a day to day basis. Your role as manager needs to evolve to meet this gap. You can’t leave it up to individuals and functional groups to make these calls when the entire context for prioritization is changing so rapidly.

My recommendation to managers is to assume a much greater role in the day to day prioritization choices your team is making. This will have the impact of improving the probability good choices are made and of sharing the evolving context by which you’re making tradeoffs and decisions with your team.

4. Listener in Chief

When things are crazy at work, my role as a manager leans heavily towards listening. I’ll have a never-ending queue of people coming to my office, frequently just to talk through issues and to vent. I want this. I frequently don’t have all the answers. I often feel powerless to fix the problems they present. But I still want them to come to me so we can talk about it. What you don’t want, is for your team members to internalize everything or resort to gossip and griping when times are tough. The mere act of expressing, listening and understanding can make the difference between a team that stays positive and productive and a team that becomes toxic.

My recommendation to managers is to get more personally involved with team members as change accelerates. Listen to them. Don’t feel compelled to have all the answers. Listening and engaging in dialogue is often enough to keep things moving and remind your team members that you’ve got their backs no matter what happens.

5. De-pressurizer

The crazier things get; the more mistakes are likely to happen. This can be a source of great stress on you and your team whether you realize it or not. New people, more work, confusing direction – these things lead to balls being dropped and to mistakes taking place. I have found it helpful to call this out publicly at my team meetings when pressure and stress are running high. By acknowledging mistakes are likely to happen and that we all need to accept this is the case but try our best anyway, a lot of the stress is removed from the environment. What you don’t want, in times of change, is for people to feel afraid. Fear brings out the worst in people. It causes them to turn on each other. It causes risk-taking to evaporate. It restricts creativity. These things will make a bad situation much worse.

My recommendation to managers is to talk openly about how crazy things are. Acknowledge that some mistakes are going to happen and that you’ll support everyone when they inevitably occur. The mere act of acknowledgement can help your team stay positive and aggressive even when times are tough.

Your optimal role as a manager changes depending on the situation you’re in. Be mindful of that. Start every day and every situation with an assessment of what is required to inspire your team to their highest potential. I hope these 5 tips were helpful. As always, I’d love to hear what has worked for you during turbulent times.

I’ve been hiring a lot lately so I’ve had the chance to observe the various ways new employees try to make strong a first impression. Having also recently started a new job myself, this topic is top of mind for me. It’s a tricky situation – starting something new. You probably just left a company where you’d built a strong reputation. You knew the industry and product and the ins and outs of the corporate structure. And now, all of a sudden, you don’t.

We all want to make an impact as quickly as we can. But how do you add value when you’re not an expert yet. How do you contribute in a meaningful way when you aren’t totally sure what the right answer is? Should you just sit back and listen? Should you voice your opinion early and often? Should you support the status quo or question everything?

It’s a complex situation that many of us get wrong a few times before we figure it out. I certainly did. Everyone starts with good intentions. We want to make a good impression and show our value. We want to make our impact felt. The problem is, in our effort to make an immediate impact, we often do more harm than good even though we mean well.

The question for this week: What are the right and wrong ways to make an impact when starting a new job, joining a new team or kicking off a new project?

Even though we all want to make a positive impact when starting something new, our actions often have the exact opposite effect. Let’s start by talking about the two most common approaches and look at why they tend to backfire.

#1 – Listen-only Mode

I realize this one might strike a chord with many of you. “Listen-only mode” is an extremely popular approach when starting a new job or joining a new team. Most people speak of it in a very positive manner and I understand why. The reason many of us gravitate towards “listen-only mode” is that we feel we should listen and understand before inserting our opinions with enthusiasm. There’s good logic behind this thinking. We’ve worked with people who recklessly dove in and started making decisions and voicing strong views when they had no idea what they were talking about. I totally get it.

The problem with operating in listen-only mode is that you’re not really contributing. You’re not adding any value. You’re not building a strong reputation or position for yourself either. You’re just watching. Listening and observing for many weeks or months in a row, reminding everyone you’re “new here” actually puts a great deal of pressure on you to deliver something hugely positive when the listening period ultimately ends. Instead of regularly adding value and delivering wins along the way, you’re architecting a situation where you need to deliver really big when the moment finally comes. And if that doesn’t work out then what?

In my opinion, the listen-only approach is far too passive and is rooted in a false assumption that the only options when starting a new job are to listen passively or to direct aggressively. It’s actually a pretty risky starting strategy masquerading as the safe play. Later in the article I will introduce a third option which allows you to make a strong positive impact without having to be reckless.

#2 – Full Steam Ahead

This is the opposite of starting a new job in “listen-only mode”. Some of us, because we so dearly want to make an impact, just dive right in. We start fast. We want people to know we mean business. Deep down inside we’re uncomfortable because we don’t have years of reputation built up at this new company. It feels like we need to sprint until we’re on solid footing again. And so we make big, sweeping moves immediately. We introduce new programs and policies right out of the gate. We hire and fire as fast as we can. We bring stuff from our last job and force it on the new company and team. We move fast … recklessly even.

Just as I understand the rationale for the “listen-only” approach. I also understand why people dive in with reckless abandon. I know exactly what it feels like to leave a place where you had a solid reputation and track record only to have to start from scratch somewhere else. You feel naked. It feels like you need to build up credit as fast as possible so you can afford to make a mistake down the road. It feels like a daily audition for the first 6 months or so. I totally get it.

The problem comes when your desire to make a big impact manifests as grandstanding or recklessness. I once joined a company as a Marketing leader and tried to change the corporate messaging within the first 3 months. I was “sure” I knew what the right strategy was. I pushed hard and implemented it. A year later I realized I actually had no idea what I was doing. I hadn’t fully understood the market or the products or the customers. In reality I was lucky it didn’t cost me my job.

When you push too hard, too soon, you can also alienate the people who will be most influential to your success. Your peers, your boss, your key staff members. You push too hard. You step into areas outside your expertise. You make strong moves without the benefit of context. If you’re not careful you can end up making the exact opposite kind of impact you set out to make in the first place.

Many of us assume (incorrectly) that “Listen-only” and “Full steam ahead” are the only two options available when staring a new job or joining a new team. This is a false dichotomy. There is another option that will allow you to make a meaningful impact without behaving recklessly or putting the business at risk.

#3 – Targeted Win Facilitation

The main reason I don’t like “listen-only” mode is that you wait too long to build a track record of measurable wins. You can’t wait 3 or 6 months for a win. It puts way too much pressure on you to rack up some huge successes at the end of your first year. And god forbid you fail on something after waiting 6 months to take a shot. But I equally dislike the “full steam ahead” approach because it too often results in major mistakes and can do irreparable damage to your reputation with the people you’re going to rely on most for your success.

My favored approach, which I’ll refer to as “targeted win facilitation”, fits somewhere between listening and charging ahead. It’s about taking on low risk wins when you first start a job or join a new team. Wins that present some upside and can build your reputation but have a low likelihood of failure. Wins that depend less on your market, customer or product expertise and more on your leadership skills. Wins that are less about you directing the team and more about you facilitating the process. Here are some examples of win facilitation:

Identify a suboptimal process and work with the team to improve it

Add a new program to demonstrate the effectiveness of a new process or approach

Work with the team to develop a new framework for prioritizing work to be more efficient

Introduce a new method or new metrics for tracking performance

Create a new type of cadence like weekly team meetings, daily standups, monthly all hands.

All of these present an opportunity to make your impact felt without carrying a lot of risk with them. Their success doesn’t depend on deep industry or company expertise. They are additive in nature so they don’t carry a significant downside compared to changing or removing programs or people. They allow you to rack up some wins without really having to risk anything. So when the time comes for you to do something big and disruptive, you’ll have built a strong reputation already which will protect you in case there are a few bumps in the road.

Next time you’re starting a new job or joining a new team or taking on a new project, remember that you have options beyond “listen-only” and “full steam ahead”. When I’m in this situation I try to facilitate some low risk wins to build up my reputation and winning record while I acquire the deep industry and customer expertise that I’ll need to take on more disruptive projects in the future. I hope this was helpful to you and would love to hear about the approaches you’ve taken when starting something new.

Incrementalism is a trap. In my opinion at least. It is a byproduct of short term, quarter by quarter thinking. It is a sure-fire way to become the victim of disruption. It is also common in just about every team I’ve ever worked with.

Whether you work at a public company or a private one, the expectation of consistent, predictable growth is ever-present. Shareholders expect 10% growth in revenue, 12% growth in earnings. The board expects 15% more customers and a 5% increase in annual contract value. The entire financial underpinning of corporations is based on incremental growth and that trickles down to our teams. We need 10% growth in sales so we need 10% growth in web site visits. We need 10% growth in web site visits so we need 10% growth in ad conversions. We need 10% growth in ad conversions so we must need 10% growth in spending. The dominos tip one by one until all of us are fixated on 10% improvement.

But is that the mindset we really want? Is that how you win in the long run? Whatever happened to being the best in the world?

The question for this week: What can managers do to discourage incremental thinking and inspire a team to pursue bigger and better goals?

Incrementalism, in my opinion, is something to be avoided at all costs. I understand the need for growth targets at the highest levels of a company, but it can’t be a replacement for the pursuit of greatness.

Some dangers in fixating on incremental growth:

It’s hard to inspire a team with a goal of 15% improvement

The pursuit of incremental improvement artificially limits innovation

Incremental goals are based on a false assumption that the current state is close to optimal

It encourages short term thinking only and deprioritizes big picture ideas

Incrementalism fails to push people and teams to their personal best

The endless quarter-by-quarter routine can trick teams into thinking only about incremental improvements. If you’re not careful, you can fool yourself and your team into thinking the attainment of short term growth objectives is the ultimate goal. It isn’t. In my opinion, a fixation on incremental growth will prevent your team from ever being great. While I understand that some short and medium term goals are necessary, I try to rally my teams around the pursuit of being the best in the world.

Here are 5 tactics I use to do that.

1. Build a Culture of Learning

One of the great things about learning is that it never ends. There is no final state where we can conclude that we’re officially learned. It’s an ongoing pursuit. When you build a culture of learning – when everyone on your team gets a little smarter and better every day – you make progress towards becoming the best in the world. While other companies and teams are fixated on growing web site traffic by 15% or increasing twitter followers by 10%, your team is pursuing something much bigger. It’s a source of advantage.

My recommendation to managers is to instill a culture of learning on your team. Focus less on incremental growth and more on the pursuit of mastery. Growth will be a natural byproduct of the collective expertise your team is accumulating every day. You’ll get growth by being the best at what you do, and you won’t artificially limit it to 15%.

2. Benchmark Beyond Your Competitive Set

I frequently see companies and teams only benchmark against industry competitors. In some areas, like revenue growth and market share, this makes sense. But in most areas of the business, comparing only to your industry competitors places an artificial ceiling that doesn’t need to be there. Back to the web site example … You work for a health care company and your team sets a goal to have the best web site in the industry. On the surface that sounds like a reasonable goal. Having a better web site than your competitors will help. But is that enough? What if all your competitors have crappy websites? Is there not a more ambitious goal to pursue? Which companies have the best web sites in the world regardless of industry? Shouldn’t that be the benchmark?

My recommendation to managers is to start benchmarking outside your set of competitors. Set loftier goals. Stop measuring solely on incremental improvement from the current state. Stop measuring yourself only against a limited set of competitors. Get your team focused on being the best in the world.

3. Take on Bigger Projects

If I need to achieve 15% growth on a metric, I will design strategies and projects to do just that. The team will play it safe, take fewer risks. There are many negative outcomes that can result from this. For one, your team will be bored and uninspired. Your whole life becomes incremental if you’re not careful. Your team becomes less engaged and before you know it even incremental growth seems unattainable. You also become more vulnerable to disruption. While you’re off pursuing small projects, some collection of college kids is making big moves in a garage somewhere.

My recommendation to managers is to have one big project going at all times. Of course, you need some small stuff, you need to hit some targets, you need to keep the lights on. But it’s vital to the health of your team and the long-term health of your business, to pursue great things. Keep one, exciting, long term project on your priority list.

4. Hire People Who Want to be Great

This one will seem self-evident at first glance. Why wouldn’t we hire people who want to be great? Who doesn’t want to be great? Don’t we all? I’m not sure we do honestly. At least not in action. Many of us want to be successful. Many of us want to be wealthy. Many of us want to be respected. But not everyone is driven by the pure motivation of being great – of mastering a craft – of being the best. In my experience, building a team of individuals who are intrinsically motivated by mastery can lead to competitive advantage.

My recommendation to managers is to seek out team members who are driven by the pursuit of greatness. Test for it in the interview process. Talk to candidates about your philosophy of moving past incrementalism and towards the world’s best, and see who’s eyes light up. Listen for clues to see which candidates are motivated to mastery. Are they dedicated to learning and self-improvement? Do they know what companies are the best in the world? Do they know what the best looks like? Do they have a plan to get there?

5. Talk Openly About the Pursuit of “Best in the World”

It’s important to talk to your team about the quest for greatness. The concept can be a check and balance when evaluating strategies and priorities. Is the approach we’re considering going to help us be the best in the world or just a little bit better? This looks like a good program, but what are the best companies in the world doing? What can we learn from them?

My recommendation is to talk openly about this philosophy. Get your team thinking about being the best vs. just getting better. Use it as a measuring stick when evaluating ideas and alternatives.

It’s easy to understand why so many companies and teams get stuck in the incrementalism trap. The financial fabric underlying all businesses encourages this type of thinking. But every so often we are reminded, by companies like AirBnB or Uber or Tesla, that there can be a steep price to pay for incremental thinking. My advice to managers is to reject incrementalism as a defining goal and rally your teams around the pursuit of best in the world.

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences with this topic. Please email me or share in the comments.

Saying “no” at work isn’t easy. At least it’s not easy to do without compromising relationships, creating conflict or dinging your reputation. In my experience, most of us get it badly wrong. Do you recognize any of these people?

Dr. No – A colleague who has zero tolerance for incoming requests. It’s an automatic “no” every time, no matter what.

Mr. Yes, Yes, Yes – A colleague who doesn’t have the courage to say “no” but can never actually fulfill a request because they’ve said “Yes” to everything.

Mr. “Talk to my boss” – A colleague who just punts requests to his or her boss to make all the hard choices on their behalf.

These approaches are as flawed as they are common. If you see yourself in one of them, don’t be alarmed, saying “no” the right way, is one of the toughest lessons we need to learn. In certain areas of a company, like Marketing, IT and HR, learning to say “no” is vital to your effectiveness and to your sanity. In fact, one of the most common questions I ask in interviews is “how do you say “no” when a colleague approaches you with a request you cannot fulfill?”.

I’ve spent most of my career trying to figure out how to say “no” the right way. And I will admit up front, that there aren’t many easy answers. I can’t give you a quick tip on how to say “no” without upsetting anyone. It’s just not that simple. But what I can do, is share the mindset I take when saying “no” and give you four approaches that have worked well for me.

The question for today: What is the right way to say “no” at work?

There is no easy way to say “no”. I’d love to tell you I have the magic formula to push back on people and requests without creating conflict. I’d love to share the perfect email template for telling a person you won’t be able to help them. Unfortunately, that’s not reality. Saying “no” is a delicate matter. Its nuanced. Doing it right requires years of practice (read: failure). I have no magic pill for you, but I can help get you in the right mindset and share some tips that will help make it a bit easier.

Here are my four tips for saying “No” the right way:

1. Play offense

The biggest reason employees struggle to accommodate mountains of inbound requests is that they haven’t communicated their own plans effectively enough. They fail to get their colleagues excited about what they are doing, so people feel compelled to come up with their own ideas and ask you to support them. You shouldn’t assume colleagues on your team and in other departments know what you’re working on. They probably have no idea. If you haven’t made a point of getting them excited about your plan, they probably assume you don’t have one.

My recommendation is to spend more time evangelizing your own plans across the company. When people are excited and invested in your plan, they’re much less likely to come to you to help support other initiatives and ideas.

2. No vs. Not Yet

I frequently see employees getting confused between saying “no” and saying “not yet”. The first one is about misalignment and the second is about prioritization. If you inadvertently say “no”, when you are aligned to the request but don’t have time to fulfill it, you do unnecessary damage to your relationships and reputation. Too many of us say “no” when we should say “Yes, but only after I’ve done A, B and C.”

My recommendation, when receiving requests, is to start by determining if you’re aligned to the request in the first place. If you think it’s misguided or a waste of time, then you need to have an honest conversation with your colleague. If you’re aligned with the request but just don’t have the capacity to deliver on it, you can have a much more productive discussion that is likely to do far less damage to your relationship than automatically saying “no”.

3. Get to the real objective

We often want to say “no” when a request comes in that seems misguided or ill conceived. Too many of us jump to “no” without engaging in a proper dialogue with the requesting colleague. This inevitably leads to strain and conflict. Your colleague feels like you’re unhelpful and you feel like your colleague comes to you with bad ideas. Everyone loses.

In my experience, most bad ideas I’m asked to support have pretty solid objectives behind them. When I take the time to understand what outcome a colleague or group is trying to achieve, I can frequently help them achieve it. Not necessarily in the exact way they had conceived of, but achieve it nonetheless. Instead of automatically saying “no” when you’re presented with what seems like a bad idea, I recommend investing a bit more time to understand the underlying objective. You might end up saying “no” to the first idea, but saying “yes” to a new one. Your colleague meets her goal and you are commended for being helpful and creative. Everyone wins.

4. Share the business context

When I need to say “no” or “not yet”, I try to share the business context with my colleagues as much as I possibly can. Too many of us, just say “no” or “I don’t have time” without sharing the context for why. The perception is that we are not supportive. Sharing the business context for why you are unable to fulfill the request can go a long way to preserving your relationships and reputation.

Rather than saying a quick “no”, I recommend investing a bit more time in context sharing. I’m more likely to say something like:

“I’d love to help you. I totally understand what you’re trying to do and I’m supportive of it. The challenge is, our number one priority is delivering the new web site. It’s critical to our company re-branding initiative and it will be dominating nearly 100% of my time for the next two months. I know this isn’t what you want to hear, but at least I wanted you to know why.”

Notice in my response that I’m sharing business context i.e. the new web site and branding initiative, vs. only sharing my personal context i.e. I’m so busy, leave me alone. This makes it less about being unhelpful and more about being driven by business priorities.

I’d love to hear how you deal with saying “no”. It’s a tricky thing and I’m certain I don’t have all the answers. Let me know what works for you.

Being a manager brings with it a special kind of pressure. When you’re an individual contributor, there is pressure to be sure. But the pressure you face when it’s all you, feels less chaotic, more controllable than when you manage a team. As a contributor, you do good work - you do well, you do bad work - you don’t do well. There’s pressure there, but for the most part, success and failure is controlled by you. On the other hand, when you’re a manager, things are much messier. Your stress and pressure become an aggregation of all the stresses and pressures for the members of your team. You don’t control the outcomes as much either, so stress comes from a never-ending fear of surprises. Instead of you being the sole agent of your brand, you now have 5 or 6 or 50 or 60 people operating in the company on your behalf. It’s enough to create anxiety in even the calmest among us.

As most of you are aware, I started a new job this year, which ratchets up the pressure a little bit more. I guess that’s why I’ve been thinking about this subject so much recently. When you’re new, you don’t have years of reputation to fall back on. Every project you take on carries the pressure of making a good impression. Every encounter with a new person carries a little more weight. You’ve got a new team too, and you need time to get used to working with each other – you need to develop trust and a track record of success.

As I’ve gone through this experience, I’ve had to focus on controlling stress and pressure more so than I’ve had to in a while. The good news is, I’ve developed a few habits that are effective for reducing pressure and preventing unnecessary stressful situations. I’m going to share them with you.

The question for today: What can managers do to reduce pressure and stress?

There is a special kind of pressure reserved only for managers. It’s the pressure that comes from being accountable for people and projects you don’t control … not fully at least. I’ve developed five habits designed to reduce the probability of high stress situations occurring and to handle stress more effectively when they inevitable emerge. I should note, I’m not including practices like mediation, yoga, exercise and diet which are all natural stress relievers. In this blog, I’m going to focus on specific business practices you can introduce that will destress your professional life.

Here are 4 Ways Managers Can Reduce Pressure and Stress

1. Score Yourself on a Longer Time Horizon

If you evaluate your performance on a moment to moment basis, you can drive yourself crazy. I first learned this lesson trading stocks. If you fixate on every movement up and down, you can miss the big picture entirely. You get antsy. You make rash decisions. You don’t let things take their natural course. It almost always pays to take a step back and assess your performance once a month or once a quarter vs. every hour or every day.

I still struggle with this one. But when I look back at most of the times I’ve been stressed out at work, I really didn’t need to be. Things worked out after a little time had passed. In retrospect, I expended a lot of negative energy fighting against stresses that were largely self-imposed and temporary. My advice to managers is to score yourself on a wider time frame. Resist the temptation to draw conclusions about how you’re doing on a day to day basis. Do a monthly or quarterly check in with yourself and take corrective actions based on the bigger picture. It’s must less stressful and more effective.

2. Treat Your Team Like Partners

You hear managers talk about treating their team members like partners, but it’s frequently just talk. It’s much more common for managers to direct the team and hold them accountable for results. In my experience, that model actually creates more stress. By operating in this way, you place yourself at the pinnacle of the pressure pyramid. All stress rolls up to you.

When you treat your team members like partners – where you undertake projects together – any pressure that exists is diffused across everyone. You all take a share of the pressure which reduces any one person’s individual burden. Moreover, when you partner and collaborate with your team, there are fewer stress creating surprises since you’re involved every step of the way.

My advice to managers is to work with your team on projects vs. directing from afar. The impact, in my experience, is higher quality outputs, a more engaged team, and much less stress for you.

3. Involve Your Boss Earlier

This one is really the inverse of the previous one so I won’t spend too much time on it. Long time readers have heard me recommend this approach before. There is very little more stressful than working on a project in isolation for an entire month and then presenting it to your boss for feedback … cold. This is a super high risk way of managing your career and places a ton of unnecessary pressure on you. Some managers, ostensibly to demonstrate independence, try to minimize how much they involve their boss in projects. I do the opposite.

By engaging your boss earlier in projects, you de-risk and de-stress the outcome. Your boss, by virtue of being involved, assumes a measure of accountability for the project and becomes personally invested in a positive outcome. The likelihood of surprise or a negative result goes down considerably. And even if the result is negative, your boss will take on a share of the responsibility. This should lead to less pressure on you and fewer unsuccessful projects.

4. Create a “No Surprises” Culture

It’s one thing for you to commit to treating your team members as partners and involving your boss earlier and more often. It’s another thing entirely to get others around you to do the same. Teams that adopt a “no surprises” culture tend to have more successful projects and way less stress. Here are a few easy things you can implement on your team to encourage this philosophy:

Weekly full team standups to stay aligned and aware across groups

Pre-launch and pre-presentation reviews to reduce mistakes or surprises

Adopt a “who else needs to know” mantra when new information is created

Getting your entire department to embrace a no surprises mindset is a win for everyone. Nobody likes to be embarrassed. Nobody likes to worry about being surprised. These are major sources of stress. Building a culture that fights against this can go a long way to reducing pressure on you and your team.

These techniques have worked well for me this year as I’ve started a new job with a new team. I’d love to hear your approaches to controlling pressure and stress at work.

This year I’ve been keeping a list of the unique behaviors I observe in the best and worst managers I meet. You might be surprised how much you miss when you’re not really paying attention and how many valuable lessons you can learn when you do. I try to apply the best of what I see to my own game and make sure I avoid the bad stuff as much as I possibly can. Of course, I also share my thoughts with you to help you learn from it as well.

This week I’m going to share four behaviors – habits really – I consistently observe in the worst managers I meet, and almost never see in the best. To be fair, if you’ve been known to do a few of these from time to time, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad manager. But it does mean you have a tendency toward a few bad manager behaviors. Whenever I inadvertently commit these mistakes, I make note of it so that over time I will rid myself of them for good. Management prowess is not a binary thing. There’s no clear goodness or badness … we’re all moving along a continuum. The most important thing is that you’re heading in the right direction and actively trying to improve your qualities as a manager.

The question for today: What are 4 things great managers almost NEVER do?

I should start by saying this is not going to be an exhaustive list. I’m certain there are many more. But this year, as I’ve made note of the best and worst things I see managers do, these 4 jumped out at me over and over again. Truth be told, I’ve probably committed a couple of these myself so don’t be too alarmed if you find yourself in a few of these. But do take notice and consider what you can do to reduce or avoid them in the future.

4 Things Great Managers NEVER do:

1. Embarrass a manager in front of their employees.

This one is for managers of managers. I see it happen much more frequently than you might imagine, and it can be crippling to a team. The typical scenario is a quarterly review or other major meeting where a leader, a team manager and her staff are all present. For whatever reason, the meeting is not going well. The results aren’t good. The leader, due to frustration and anger, rips into the team manager and goes way beyond a critical analysis of the team’s performance. It is clear, to all in the room (including her team) that the leader has lost confidence in the manager.

When you do this, you might as well just fire the team manager. It’s impossible to manage and motivate a team when they all know your boss has lost confidence in you. This situation leads to insubordination and the complete evaporation of engagement and accountability.

My recommendation to leaders is to stick to objective analysis and critique of performance in these group settings. If you’re frustrated and angry, keep the manager afterwards and be hard on her then. Don’t embarrass a manager in front of her team.

2. Defend their people no matter what.

This one is the almost the opposite of the first one and may raise a few eyebrows at first. It is nuanced to be fair. Yes, you should always support your people. Great managers go to bat for their teams. Great managers protect their employees when times are tough. BUT … great managers do not defend unfair, unethical or inappropriate behavior, no matter whose behavior it is. Some of you might think this one is obvious but I’ve seen it several times this year already. There is a segment of the leadership population who have adopted a “defend at all costs” mentality. If a team member screws up, they’ll defend it. If a team member is rude to a fellow employee, they’ll defend it. If a team member acts inappropriately they’ll try to sweep it under the rug. Ostensibly this is solidarity but in my opinion its unacceptable. It sets a terrible example for your team and can led to serious cultural issues at the company.

My recommendation to managers is to defend on a case by case basis. There is no blanket approach that works in this circumstance. If a team member has made an honest mistake, then defend the person but acknowledge the error. Don’t just blindly defend or deflect no matter what. If a team member has acted inappropriately or unethically, you need to call it out and fight against it. As a leader, you are responsible for upholding the organization’s values and your own moral code. You can’t just defend bad behavior because the offender is on your team. Call it out. Make it right. Ask yourself if this is someone you really want on your team.

3. Turn on your team when things go bad.

This one is pretty ugly, but it happens quite a bit. You’re preparing to review a project with your boss’s boss. Naturally you do a preview session with your boss beforehand to get his blessing on the work and to make sure there are no surprises. In the preview meeting, your boss loves the work, he’s thrilled. Then the big meeting takes place and its clear it’s not going well. It’s totally missing the mark and your boss’s boss is not happy. Surely your manager will have your back since you aligned ahead of time on the approach right? Not always, I’m afraid. Some managers – the not so good ones – have a tendency to switch sides and start openly critiquing the work to save their own skin. Sound familiar? It’s quite gross actually.

I know exactly what it feels like to be every party in this scenario. I’ve been turned against, and I’ve also felt like jumping ship and saving myself when I realized the team’s work wasn’t as good as I thought it was. But you cannot do that. You can’t turn on your team. If you do, you’ll lose them forever. No matter how embarrassing or painful it might feel. No matter how much damage you think it may do to you personally, you just can’t bail on the team when they did all the right things and aligned with you ahead of time. You just have to take the hit, go back and try again.

4. Talk negatively about staff in front of their peers.

This is another one that seems like it should be obvious but it’s really not. I’ve actually seen more of this in the last 5 years than I had previously, though I’m not exactly sure why. The scenario is, you’re in a meeting with a few employees about some topic or project. For whatever reason, another employee is mentioned in connection to an issue or mistake but is not present in the room. The manager, who is perpetually frustrated with this employee, rolls his eyes or makes a snide remark about the incompetence of the team member in front of her peers.

When you do this, a few things happen. The first one is you’re giving permission to the employees in the room to behave the way you do. You’re setting a terrible example for how to treat staff when they’re not present. Whether you realize it or not, your own mistake is made exponential as you inspire others to gossip and belittle other team members as you do. The second one is you’re basically making it impossible for the employee you’ve belittled to be successful in the company. Now, everyone knows you don’t respect them which will make it incredibly difficult for that person to operate effectively on the team anymore. People will distance themselves from the person. Team members won’t want to align to their initiatives anymore. It actually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. One eye roll about a team member in front of their peers can set off a chain of events that almost guarantee failure for that person in the company. The last thing that happens is the other team members in the room, while they might giggle or nod when you make comments about their peer, are really thinking: “hmmm, I wonder if he says this about ME when I’m not here …?”

My recommendation to managers is to hold it in. I know you’re frustrated. I know it’s the tenth time you’ve seen that person drop the ball. I know you want people to know you’re aware of the problem. I know it feels easier to make some snide remark in front of a group than to actually have the hard conversation with the employee in question. But you must.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, I’m certain this list is not exhaustive. I hope the ones I have shared with you are helpful as you work on your own management skills. I’d really like to hear about some of the things you’ve witnessed lately that we can add to the list.

While I was on vacation this week I re-read one of my favorite management books: Turn that Ship Around by David Marquet. This is a massively underrated leadership book in my opinion. If you haven’t read it, I highly recommend checking it out – I love the audio version.

One of the points he makes strongly in the book is the concept of building a team of leaders vs installing the classic leader-follower model. He calls it “leader:leader” in the book. He expresses concern that many teams are too highly dependent on the unique skills and personalities of one dynamic leader. The impact is that the team will perform well only so long as that specific leader is in place. Once the leader moves on or up, the team stops performing at a high level.

For the managers out there:

Do you ever feel apprehensive about going on vacation and leaving your team to fend for themselves?

Do you find yourself frequently jumping in to save the day on projects that have fallen off track?

Do you have a pile of approvals you need to work through every week?

Do team members line up outside your office door with problems every day?

Do you believe your team could perform well if you weren’t there?

The best leaders build teams for the long term. They architect operating processes and principles that can scale beyond themselves. They distribute power instead of hoarding it. They build teams to run smoothly without them.

Thinking about this issue over the past few days has led me to ask a question of myself. I will pose the same question to you:

Are you TOO important to your team?

I thought back on the best leaders I've ever worked with and identified four common behaviors I try to replicate to ensure I'm building a team that can thrive long after I'm gone.Building a team of leaders is ultimately about creating a culture of empowerment. You won’t hear me use the term “empowerment” much because, like David Marquet, I’ve always felt it carries an intrinsic sentiment of control with it. To say that I “empower” my team, implies that I have the power to assign out in the first place. In that sense, the very act of dolling out power as I choose, is disempowering. Putting terminology aside, our goal as managers is to build teams of leaders so they can operate and scale for the long term – whether or not we are present.

When I think back to the best managers I’ve worked with, four common behaviors come to mind. I think they can help you as you try to build leadership at all levels of your team.

Resist the Urge to Save the Day

One of the most demoralizing things that can happen to a team is to get part way through a project and have the manager step in to save the day when it turns out to be heading off course. This happens all the time. I would argue some managers, whether they realize it or not, actually create this problem themselves. At some level it actually feels good to have to come in and save the day, though I suspect most managers would be reluctant to admit it. Whatever the reason is, when a manager has to consistently step in to fix projects, team morale and performance suffers.

After it happens a few times, teams start getting used to the idea and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. At some point, teams just assume their leader will jump in and correct course, and so they don’t bother getting personally invested in projects anymore. I see this all the time and it’s a killer both to engagement and results. Any sense of personal accountability vanishes.

My recommendation to managers is to resist the urge to jump in and save the day. Give your teams more opportunity to deliver and fail and correct course. It might hurt a couple of times along the way but it’s a great investment in your team’s long term health.

Encourage Leaders to Present Solutions vs. Problems

One sign that you haven’t built a team of leaders is when your team constantly comes to you with problems to solve. A sign of a healthy team, is when they come to you with intended courses of action designed to address issues and capitalize on opportunities. If your team members consistently defer their problems to you, it probably means you are hoarding control whether you intended to or not. It may not be easy to admit, but it can feel good when people come to you with their problems to solve. It’s nice to feel needed. But this type of team structure – one where all problems are solved by you – cannot scale.

My recommendation to managers is to resist the temptation to solve every problem presented to you. Challenge your team to bring you intended solutions or options to address an issue rather than just bringing problems to you. You’ll find, in the long term, that this leads to better morale, developing leaders and a more scalable organization.

Allow Conflict to Play Itself Out

Some managers are uncomfortable with conflict on their teams. They like things to be harmonious. So they constantly step in to resolve disputes or force compromise. Patrick Lenceoni wrote beautifully about this in The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, so I won’t go into too much detail here on it. The challenge is, if you don’t allow your team to resolve their own conflicts, they start deferring to you more frequently. Before long you’ll find yourself in a situation where your leaders are unable or unwilling to operate without you in place to police every issue. I know I’m headed in the wrong direction in this regard when I feel like my managers come to me with complaints about other teams and managers all the time with the expectation that I will jump in and resolve the issues.

My recommendation to managers is to let healthy conflict happen. Let it go a little longer. Push accountability for resolving issues down to your team. Remind everyone of the higher level team objectives and force them to address their issues with these objectives and the guiding principles in mind. When team members come to you with small grievances about other teams and leaders, push it back on them to resolve unless they’re truly egregious.

Create Continuous Dialogue vs. Big Bang Approvals

There are few things as demoralizing and counter productive than for a team to work for several weeks or months on a project, do a big reveal presentation only to have it get rejected by the manager. This type of process – lots of work followed by a big bang approval – can be deadly to the performance and engagement of a team. A few of these in a row and you’ll suck any modicum of leadership and accountability from your team. For the same reason I coach people to avoid big bang reveals for the good of their own careers, I recommend that managers discourage them as well.

My recommendation to managers is to create a continuous dialogue with your teams around the projects they’re working on. It’s not about micro managing. It’s not about taking control. It’s about getting in there and helping your team be successful. Your job as a manager is to create a situation where your people can win. Maintaining a dialogue around projects – early and often – helps set them up for success and will also help build a track record of wins. Don’t sit back in your office and wait for your team to present you finished products. Get in there with them and help them win.

Our mindset as managers needs to be about building teams that can scale. Building teams for the long term. Deep down inside it might feel somewhat gratifying to feel like your team can’t thrive without you, but that is just ego, and you need to fight against it. Your goal should be to build a team of leaders that can operate in a happy and high performing way whether or not you are present. I hope these tips were helpful to you and I’d love to hear about other behaviors you’ve seen work as well.

I hear this question more than you might think: Am I management material?

I most often hear it from new managers and individual contributors on the path to management. But in fairness, I’m not sure this question is reserved only for the newest among us. I think we all wonder from time to time whether or not we have what it takes to be a great manager. Whether we were built from “management material”. I’m not ashamed to admit, I’ve asked that question of myself more than once.

Whenever I hear this question, the first thought that comes to my mind is: “Are any of us really made of management material?” I’m not sure I was ... but maybe I am now. Any qualities I now possess as a manager were developed over the course of a long cycle of mistakes and self-reflection. I’ve seen so many different approaches to management succeed and fail, I’m not 100% sure there even is such a thing as management material per se. The concept of some management template through which super managers are pressed does not jive with my observations and experiences. What I am sure of is, there are some characteristics common across all great managers. Some people will argue that these are attributes you’re born with – I’m not so sure. In my experience, the qualities that make exceptional managers can be discovered, developed and optimized.

The question for today: What exactly is management material and how do I get me some?

Great managers come in all different shapes and sizes. As I’ve alluded to, I don’t think there is a single management mold. We all enter into management through different paths and with many different motivations. Many of us became managers because it was the only obvious path to earning more income. Many of us chose the management path because it was the best way to have a big impact on the company. Others have ambitions for management because it seems like the best way to keep score in your career. Some of us became managers almost by accident – it just happened and we never thought about the why’s and what for’s. And then some of us find unique intrinsic rewards that management offers and individual contribution doesn’t – leading, teaching, helping.

Whatever your reason for being a manager, you want to be good at it. Here are some of the traits I see common across all the great managers I’ve worked with and observed. Unlike some “management material” proponents who see these traits as a fixed set of gifts you’re born with, I believe you can work on these and develop them until the day you retire.

1. The Courage to be Honest

It’s often easier not to be totally honest with people. In the short run at least. It can also seem easier not to be honest with ourselves about the true state of the team and our performance. For a while at least. Honesty, in the management context, always feels like the harder path. Providing critical feedback, hurting people’s feelings, admitting failure, having uncomfortable conversations. Honesty at work hurts a lot of the time. It’s the painful path that our minds and instincts scream at us to avoid. The greatest managers take this path every time.

For many years, I don’t think I was totally honest at work. I wasn’t lying to people, but I wasn’t being as honest as I could have been. I let my desire for harmony and happiness trick me into taking the easier path. I’d sugar coat critical feedback to my staff. I might start a tough conversation but then quickly try and turn it positive. I’d try to find the silver lining in every situation and focus on that. It was easier … on me. But what I didn’t realize at the time, is that I was being unfair to my team members and to myself by not being totally honest with them.

My recommendation to managers and future managers is to opt for the honest path every time. Force yourself to have the hard conversations, to give feedback that is tough to hear, and to be objective in assessing your team and yourself. In the short term it can be more painful, but in the long term it leads to greater success for everyone.

2. The Strength to Ask “Why?”

The more experience I get as a manager, the more basic my questions seem to be at work. It’s a funny thing actually. I think when you’re early in your career, you’re reluctant to ask very basic “why” questions because you fear you’re supposed to know the answer already. You’re afraid of asking “why” because people might think you don’t get it or that you’re just trying to be disruptive. It takes a lot of strength to ask why and the great managers, in my experience, have it.

Great managers aren’t afraid of looking dumb. They care about actually understanding and actually driving performance more than they care about what others might think about them. They operate under the philosophy that everything should be questioned. Great managers have seen what happens when you sit passively and accept the status quo. They understand that asking “why” is a seed for innovation and transformation.

My recommendation to managers is to make a point of asking “why” more often. Even if you’re new to a job or new in your career, don’t be afraid of not understanding or looking silly. Ask why.

3. The Ability to be Open but Decisive

I don’t think you can be a great manager if you’re indecisive. You just can’t run a team without providing clear direction. Teams led by indecisive managers spin out of control and inevitably become toxic. With that said, there is a big difference between decisiveness and narrow mindedness. The best managers, can make strong decisions and also entertain counter arguments and alternative strategies. This is easier said than done. It might seem obvious and easy enough but it’s not.

Many managers, in their effort to be collaborative and inclusive, start managing by consensus. They create a team democracy of sorts, where they take the pulse of the room and opt for the most popular path every time. This is not leadership. Sure, it seems like open collaboration and probably feels great at the time, but it’s not a path to success in the long run. But neither is single mindedness. Some managers, particularly those who have been successful individual contributors, opt to direct vs. include. That is a recipe for low engagement and is based on a fundamentally flawed assumption that you always know the optimal path.

My recommendation to managers is to embed a spirit of healthy debate and objective analysis into your team culture. Set clear objectives, encourage team members to offer alternative approaches, debate them on their merits, make a decisive decision, explain why, and move forward aggressively.

4. An Understanding of Scale and Leverage

The best manager I ever knew, seemed to sit at his desk and do nothing all day. It was something to behold. In my opinion he had reached the pinnacle of management prowess. He had mastered the art of achieving leverage and scale through empowerment.

As you manage larger and larger teams, you inevitably come upon a moment where you are forced to acknowledge the concepts of scale and leverage. When we first move from being individual contributors to managers we get caught in the trap of trying to scale ourselves. We try to get everyone to do what we do. We tell people how to do things. We architect processes and systems with ourselves as the bottleneck. The reason we do this is that in our hearts, we don’t believe in other people as much as we believe in ourselves. We spend a lot of time thinking about how we would do it and wondering why others can’t replicate that. This is a trap.

The best managers in the world truly embrace the concepts of leverage and scale. They become totally focused on others and stop focusing on themselves. They build organizations and programs and processes unconstrained by their personal capacity.

5. The Fulfillment of Teaching

The best managers I’ve ever worked for were also great teachers. They genuinely loved to teach. They took joy out of helping people develop into greater versions of themselves. They understood that a team that improves every day will ultimately become a competitive advantage.

For me, teaching is probably the single biggest pleasure I take out of management. And if I didn’t enjoy it, I’m not exactly sure I’d want to be a manager.

My recommendation to managers is to embrace teaching as a vital part of your job. Embed learning into the culture of your team. It will make your job more fulfilling and your team more engaged.

Whether there is really such a thing as “management material”, I’m not so sure. But what I am sure of is the best managers I’ve ever worked with had these attributes in common. I’d love to hear about other attributes you see in great managers. Share them in the comments section.

At least half the people I coach complain to me about a micromanaging boss. The irony, which I won’t dwell on today, is that several of them lean towards micromanagement themselves. The fact is, micromanagement is widespread and it can be a miserable situation to find yourself in.

Your boss doesn’t trust you to do anything on your own

You think you’ve done all the right things and then your boss changes the rules

You have creative ideas and your boss is too narrow minded even to consider them

Every time you try to take initiative and move things forward, you get shut down

Your boss complains that she has to do everything, but won’t let you actually do anything

Over months and years of micromanagement, you’ve started to doubt yourself

Any of these sound familiar? Its infuriating honestly. You feel like you’re caught in a trap and there is no way out. You try to be proactive and take the initiative and you get shut down. You don’t take initiative and you get criticized for not being a leader. It’s enough to drive a person mad.

With enough time working for a micromanager, we all lose confidence. We lose an entire part of who we once were. We become defensive and cautious. We walk on eggshells. We question ourselves. I remember living in this micromanagement zone for some of the worst years of my career. It’s sad and hard to recover from.

I won’t sugar coat this for you. There is no easy way out of a micromanagement situation. There’s no “3 tips to fix it all”. Unfortunately, that’s just not reality and anyone who tells you it is, isn’t being honest with you or themselves. There is no magic bullet to fix it completely, but you can make things better. You can find a way to be successful and happier working for a micromanager.

Here are my suggestions when you find yourself working for a micromanager:

1. Change your mindset

Most of us, when facing a micromanaging boss, focus on how unfair it is. We fight against it, we complain, we gripe and gossip with our coworkers, we imagine ways we can force our boss to change. This is a mistake. If you’re doing this, I have to tell you, you’re focusing on the wrong things. My recommendation is to step back from the situation for a moment and reorient your mindset. When I’m faced with a micromanager I ask myself: “How can I be successful in this situation?”. “How can I adjust my approach so I can come out on top?”

Stop complaining, stop fighting, start planning your path to success. I realize that is easier said than done, but there is no other way. You don’t get to change your boss. But you can find a way to be successful in just about any scenario.

2. Avoid the temptation to pursue the “Tadaaaa” moment

The tendency, when working for a micromanager, is to try and prove your worth by demonstrating you can work independently. You’ve been dinged a few times; your boss seems not to trust you, so you set out to prove to her that she can. You go off on your own, work 24-7 on a solo mission with visions of dropping a huge win on her lap … tadaaaa – look at me!!

Don’t do this. That is exactly the opposite of the approach you should be taking to make things work with a micromanaging boss. If you go off on your own and try to deliver some monster win to prove that you can be trusted, it will backfire 9 times out of 10. It backfires because it’s completely ignoring the reason WHY your boss is a micromanager in the first place. He hates the unknown. He’s afraid of losing control. He’s anxious about change. Going rogue, even if it is backed by the best of intentions, is the last thing you want to do.

My recommendation is to avoid the temptation to prove your independence. You can’t fix the situation by making your boss even more uncomfortable. Stop proving and start helping.

3. Bring your boss closer … earlier

Instead of proving yourself, you should be focusing on helping your boss be successful. The more successful your boss is, the less fear she will have. The less fear she has, the less she will seek to control everything. Instead of pushing a micromanaging boss away, I’ll bring him closer. There are a few simple things you can do to bring your boss closer without making your own life miserable. If I’m about to undertake a new project, I might do the following things:

Set up early collaboration sessions with your boss to build the objectives and plan.

Involve your boss in building the skeleton or outline of a presentation or document.

Proactively give updates on a daily or weekly basis depending on the scope of the project.

Proactively review all materials with your boss before sharing them broadly

By collaborating with your boss earlier and more frequently, your projects are much more likely to be successful. You’re far less likely to get way off track or be surprised by negative feedback in the later stages of the initiative. You may feel you shouldn’t have to do this at your level, or that this robs you of your independence. I would argue that this is the optimal path for the scenario you’re in. It’s the best path to success. The more success you enjoy, the more opportunities you’ll have to improve your situation. If success isn’t worth this level of sacrifice, or the situation is unbearably negative, you should start looking for a new job.

4. Create a position of strength before having the big conversation

Eventually, you are going to want to talk to your boss about how you feel. It’s really not healthy to work for a micromanager in the long term. I did it for far too long and it hurt me. The problem is, too many of us have this conversation when we’re in a weak position. We explode when a project has gone off the rails or after we’ve been criticized for doing poor work or for not providing enough visibility. We wait and wait and wait and then finally have the discussion when we can’t take it anymore – when we’re at our weakest. This is exactly the opposite of what you should do.

My recommendation is to start by building credibility with your boss. Use the tips I’ve shared. Help your boss, bring her closer, find a few wins, and then in a calm, positive moment, have the conversation.

Inevitably we all end up working for a micromanager. When we’re in the early stages of our careers we tell ourselves it will go away when we’re more senior. When we’re more senior we tell ourselves it will go away when we’re an executive. It doesn’t go away. Micromanagement is a byproduct of fear and fear doesn’t care about titles.

As difficult as it may seem, my advice is to stop complaining and fighting against your micromanager, and start finding ways to be successful. It can be done. And the more success you find, the more opportunities will come to you and the stronger your position will be when you ultimately need to have the big conversation with your boss.

Use the comments section and tell me about your micromanager stories. I’d love to hear them and happy to give advice where I can.

“I’ve been a manager for 8 years, when will I be ready to be a Director?”

“I want to be a Director; how do I get there?"

I get these questions all the time. From my coaching clients and from my team members. The Director level, in most organizations, is where career progression really gets tough. There are a number of reasons why this is the case, the most significant of which is that relatively speaking, there just so few Director positions available. Within most professions the progression from specialist to associate manager to manager to senior manager is very attainable with a solid effort and some time. But something changes at the Director level. This is where so many careers stall out.

The jump from Manager to Director seemed unattainable to me for a number of years and it wasn’t until quite recently that I understood why it eluded me for so long. Today I’m going to share the lessons I learned on that journey in hopes that they can help you. For those of you who are hoping to one day attain the Director level in your career, my hope is that I can help you focus on the most important things to achieve it. For those of you who are already there or who are managing large teams of Managers and Directors, my hope is we can start a dialogue on what qualities you look for in Director level staff.

Before I go too much further I should note that not all companies think of the Director level in the same way. For simplicity I’m using the most common organizational hierarchy I know of – and the one I’m personally most familiar with. Specialist > Manager > Director > Vice President. If this doesn’t sound like the one you know, there should still be some core themes you can apply to your own company or scenario.

What is common in just about every career is that making the jump from Manager to Director is really hard. In my experience it demands the biggest fundamental shift in skillset of any of the career levels.

Here are four attributes you must have to advance from Manager level to Director level.

I vividly recall the day I realized I had no idea what I was doing as a Manager and why I was having no luck successfully making the next jump in my career. My guess is that many of you, like me, woke up one day and realized that most of the things required to be a great individual contributor were the exact opposite of the things you need to be successful at the Director level. You can kind of get away with it for a while at the Manager level but it gets exposed at the Director level when you start having to operate cross functionally and manage a larger team with a broader set of responsibilities.

I distinctly remember the moment when I realized my approach to management was no longer effective and would never lead to success at the Director level and above. Here’s what I realized about my flawed approach:

I was overly focused on myself and my team and not focused enough on the goals of the company

I was good at telling people what to do but not good at teaching people how to become great

I had architected a team structure that made me a bottle neck instead of a facilitator

I was good at enforcing existing practices but not good at establishing new standards for excellence

I was good at developing better individual contributors but not good at developing future managers

I realized the skills and approaches that had served me so well on my way up from Junior Associate Manager (Yes, that was my actual title) just weren’t going to make me effective at the next level. And so I set out to change my perspective. I watched the best Directors and Executives I knew and tried to figure out what made them great. Ultimately I landed on 4 key attributes I have tried to develop in myself and that I use now as the benchmark for what I look for in Director level staff on the teams I lead.

Here are my 4 keys to successfully move from the Manager level to the Director level.

Excel at Developing Other Managers

The most important characteristic I look for in high potential Directors is a talent for developing Managers. This is arguably the most important thing a Director does for a company. It’s how the company secures its own future success. Without a strong and consistent pipeline of Managers, a company will ultimately fizzle out.

Unlike at the Manager level, where you can primarily focus on developing a relatively narrow set of competencies within individual contributors, Directors must coach and mentor individuals to become great managers. This requires a fundamentally different approach. Many of the attributes that make a strong individual contributor are precisely the opposite of what makes a strong manager. Which is not to say that strong contributors can’t become strong managers, but rather that a mindset shift needs to take place.

In my experience you can achieve some measure of success at the Manager level by just directing your team members to behave as you did when you were a top performing contributor. There is some value to be gained from this and you will likely see incremental improvement for a while. But this approach starts to fail at the Director level. At this level you really need to excel at teaching the unique qualities of required to be a great Manager and be committed to doing it. The challenge many of us face, is that we don’t assign a high enough priority to these activities and rather focus on what we’re comfortable with.

My recommendation for Managers who want to be Directors one day is to start making the mental shift now. Start mastering the art of management to balance out the professional and functional expertise that have led to success you’ve had thus far in your career.

Establish Yourself as a Cross Functional Leader

At the Contributor and Manager level, your world is relatively small. Your projects tend not to extend much past your individual team or department. Your contribution to corporate initiatives tends to be quite isolated on a relative scale. And so you can get away without mastering the art of cross functional leadership … for a while.

A Director, on the other hand, must frequently lead projects that span many groups and departments. A Director must be able to lead people and teams they don’t directly manage themselves. This requires an entirely new set of leadership and influence skills.

Many managers, who are comfortable directing staff members in a relatively controlled environment, become exposed as they are forced into complex, multi departmental management scenarios where they don’t have legitimate power over the individuals and groups they need to lead. It’s one thing to be able to make people who report to you do something. It’s a much different thing to be able to influence people, over whom you have no direct power, execute against your vision or direction.

My recommendation for would-be Directors is to get involved in more cross functional committees and projects now so you can begin learning what it takes to be successful in this type of environment. Just being a part of these types of projects will give you a good sense for what works and what doesn’t. That way, when it’s time for you to move up to the Director level, you’ll already be well versed in cross-functional leadership.

Set New Standards for Excellence

Managers, for the most part, are expected to lead a team to execute reliably against an established process, and to meet or exceed existing performance benchmarks. There is a degree of comfort that comes with this, especially for those of us who were once individual contributors who excelled in the very same process and are now leading a team to do the same. You can have success as a Manager, for a while at least, by optimizing a team’s performance against the current benchmark.

A Director however, in my opinion, needs to be thinking quite a bit differently from this. Granted there is always a need to optimize performance against a benchmark. But the Director, unlike the Manager, needs to be much more focused on setting new standards for excellence. The Director needs to reset the bar at a higher level and move past organic or incremental improvements as the measure of success. The Director must inspire a team to embrace improvements that are orders of magnitude higher than the status quo. Whereas a Manager needs to be strong at leading a team to execute within a process, the Director needs to lead a team to adopt new and uncomfortable processes that can produce multi-level jumps in performance if executed effectively.

My recommendation, if you want to make a successful jump to Director, is to start focusing less on improving upon your team’s historical performance and start focusing on how to become the best team in the world at whatever discipline you hold. In my opinion, too few teams and departments set lofty enough goals for themselves and artificially limit their potential by fixating on incremental improvements instead of the pursuit of greatness.

Teach the Model. Don’t Prescribe the Action

Manager-level leaders can be effective, at least on a small scale, by accurately prescribing approaches and actions and holding the team accountable for executing them. Telling team members “what to do and how to do it” can, for a while, produce reasonable results. But this approach does not scale well at the Director level and above. Once you start managing larger teams and developing new managers yourself, a mindset shift is required.

Directors, unlike managers, need to excel at teaching instead of prescribing. A great Director level leader teaches “why we do things the way we do” instead of just “what we do and how we do it”. There is a big difference between the two approaches.

For example, in Marketing, it’s one thing to be able to tell people what the message and positioning is for a specific customer segment. This is Manager-level thinking. You accurately communicate what the message is so they can build and execute campaigns. You tell them what it is and they learn to do it.

The Director, on the other hand, needs to truly understand the model for creating the messaging. The Director needs to understand how to build effective messaging in any scenario and know why the messaging is the way it is. The Director needs to know the architecture for messaging and be able to teach others how to do it effectively.

Learning the fundamental models for the key functional processes and competencies in your discipline is a key developmental milestone in your career and a gate keeper to achieving the Director level in my opinion. I’m frequently surprised by how few managers (and Directors) can’t really articulate WHY they do things the way they do. They know they work but not WHY they work. They don’t understand the models behind the processes and practices and therefore can’t effectively teach it to others.

My recommendation is to become a student of your discipline. Not just at the surface level either. You need to really invest time and effort in understanding the models behind your profession to so you can teach people how to think about things vs. telling them what action to take.

Inevitably, every career runs up against road blocks. For me, the biggest sticking point was at the Director level and I see a similar phenomenon in the clients I coach and the employees I manage. I hope my observations and lessons are helpful to any would-be Directors out there. And, for those of you who are already there, I’d love to hear about the lessons you learned along the way.

Its offsite season. The year is half finished and we’re starting to get picture of how things are going. Are we on track? Are we going to hit our numbers? Do we need to make changes? Is the team performing as we’d like it? It feels like there is still enough time to make adjustments and revise plans if needed … but not much time.

If your team is doing well, the offsite meeting is a chance to celebrate wins and build on momentum. If your team is struggling, it’s a chance to offer some tough love, make some changes and reset with a positive mindset.

I’ve been to my fair share of lousy offsite meetings. To be honest, I carried a healthy dose of cynicism about them for many years. Endless presentations, awkward team building exercises, forced fun, faux alignment, excessive amounts of coffee and croissants. It all just seemed so contrived to me. So artificial. And more often than not, nothing materially changed as a result of them. I have to admit, for a long time I was a skeptic.

But in recent years, I’ve come to see real value in the team offsite meeting. If … and that’s a big IF … you do them the right way.

The question for today: What are the do’s and don’ts for team offsite meetings?

We’ve all been to team building and team offsite meetings that are truly excruciating. That’s why so many of us – me included – hold so much skepticism towards them. We want them to be everything they promise to be, but we’ve been let down so many times. I get it. My hope for today is that I can share with you my do’s and don’ts for hosting a team offsite so you can regain some of that hope and optimism you had walking into your first offsite.

Here are my favorite Do’s and Don’ts for hosting a team offsite:

Do’s

1. Build something as a team

Too many offsite meetings are overly focused on business review and plan sharing. I prefer to use them as an opportunity for the team to build or fix something that has tangible value. Take a tough problem you’re dealing with and spend two hours as a team fixing it. Build an integrated program from start to finish. Do something as a team that has demonstrable value. Something, that if all else fails, you can point to after the offsite as a real win. In my experience, bringing the team together to actually build or fix something sets a great tone for the rest of the year and shows the value of working as a team.

2. Do something philanthropic

This is a more recent one for me, but I like it. Having the team step outside of work for moment to help other people can be very positive for morale. It’s also a great way to gain a little perspective on the issues you’ll tackle together in the rest of the meeting. In my experience, kicking off a meeting with a few hours working with a local charity gets the team in a healthy mindset to take on the business issues that will follow.

3. Move data review to pre-reading

Many team offsite meetings fail because they overwhelm the participants with data and dense content. The impact is the team members spend so much energy trying to digest information, they are unable to have meaningful dialogue around it. So nothing actually happens. Instead of spending your time collaborating on solutions, you end up focusing your time understanding and assimilating data. My advice is to publish all content at least a few days ahead of time so the team can come prepared to discuss and debate instead of digest.

4. Establish one core theme

It’s important to know what you’re trying to accomplish before you plan your offsite meeting. That sounds obvious but I’m not sure it’s done effectively in practice. What is the state of your team? What is your biggest issue? If you could only fix one thing, what would it be? For a team I managed recently, our biggest problem was working across functional groups. Each group was solid but projects that spanned multiple groups we not strong. So we designed the entire offsite meeting with the goal of addressing that one issue … and it helped. If you try to take on too many different things or approach the meeting with a generic purpose, you run the risk of accomplishing nothing of substance. My advice is to pick one theme for the meeting aligned with whatever they biggest challenge is you face.

5. Address real problems

There is a tendency in team offsite meetings to gloss over things. We create the illusion of momentum rather than actually making progress. We present a bunch of content, we do some team building exercises, we park a few touchy subjects, and we pat ourselves on the back. But we never actually resolve anything of substance. My advice is to use this precious time with your entire team to make real progress on one or two issues that really matter.

6. Reaffirm the team’s purpose

If your team is anything like mine, it’s always changing. You have new people joining, roles shift, and priorities change. It’s important, in my opinion, to start the offsite meeting by reminding everyone why they are all here in the first place. What is the company trying to do? What are our goals for this year? What kind of team are we trying to build? What are our values? Why are we here? Starting the meeting by reminding everyone of the fundamental purpose of the team and the goals of the company, you get everyone in the optimal mindset to make progress.

7. Follow up with regular cadence

How many offsite meetings have you been to where everyone leaves full of optimism and energy only to never speak of it again? Offsite ideas have a tendency to die on the vine. We never actually harvest the ideas and adjustments we seem so committed to in the moment. It’s kind of sad actually. But it happens over and over again. It’s no wonder there are so many offsite cynics amongst us. But … it doesn’t have to be this way. My advice is to pull a few key initiatives from the meeting discussions and turn them into projects you actively manage until the next offsite. And then, early in the next offsite agenda, report on the outcome of the projects. Keep the number of initiatives to a minimum – just the big ones.

8. Bring in customers or outside speakers

Teams have a tendency to get insulated from the rest of the company and from the market. We get locked into a way of thinking and we can lose perspective if we’re not careful. I like to use the offsite meeting as an opportunity to disrupt the common perspective. Inviting customers or leaders of other teams to speak at your team offsite is a really good way to get your team thinking differently. For Marketing, Sales, Product and Support teams, I love having customers come in to tell their stories firsthand. For HR, Finance, IT and other operational teams, it’s nice to have other leaders come into speak about their processes and challenges.

Don’ts

9. Make it a one-way broadcast

One way to guarantee low engagement and muted results for you next offsite meeting is to build an agenda comprised primarily of one-way communication. This might sound obvious to you but most offsites I’ve been to consist of a series of presentations by functional leaders followed by almost no questions from audience members who are mostly focused on trying to stay awake. Don’t make this mistake. Build collaboration into your sessions. Build something together. Brainstorm solutions to problems. Debate and discuss.

10. Fixate on business review and plans

At some point you need to review the team’s performance and share plans for the coming months. Just don’t make it your entire agenda. Don’t even make it a quarter of your agenda. It’s a rare thing to have your entire team together. You can do anything you want. Why make it about listening to business reviews and plan? Sure you need people to be informed and aware, but do you really need to use these precious hours for that purpose? Why not do a one-hour web meeting a week in advance to present the plans and then use the offsite to make progress on them? Why not send the plans out in advance as pre-reading and then use the time together to brainstorm ideas?

11. Pack the agenda too tightly

The worst offsite meetings feel rushed. The pace is too fast so nothing of substance gets accomplished. You feel pressured by time so you race through the tough issues or you park them for follow-up discussion. That’s exactly the opposite of what you should be doing when you have your entire team sitting in a room outside of the office. Now is the time to debate and discuss without another meeting looming in 10 minutes. My recommendation is to take whatever agenda you think has the optimal pace and reduce it by another 20 percent. I’ve never been to an offsite that finished early. We always over estimate what we can accomplish in a day or two. Take your time, take on less, make real progress on a smaller set of topics.

12. Structure around functions only

Many offsite agendas are structured around functional reporting. In the Marketing team example, you typically build an agenda where each functional leader presents a report of progress and a plan for the upcoming period. The web team presents web stuff. The creative team presents creative stuff. The product team presents product stuff. You get the picture. The problem with this is teams don’t actually operate like this in practice. In actual fact, all these functions work together to achieve outcomes for the company. If you don’t want your teams operating in silos (something every manager gripes about) then don’t structure your agenda in silos. My recommendation is to build your offsite agenda around cross functional challenges and initiatives. Do a working session on how all the teams can contribute to helping the company win in a new market. Do a brainstorming session on how we can optimize our multi-team process for launching new products. If you have your entire team together already, you might as well use the time to focus on issues that are relevant to the entire team.

13. Take all hard issues offline

Don’t park all the hard stuff. Don’t take all the contentious issues “offline”. The offsite meeting is the perfect moment to get into it. As managers, I think we’re too quick to take things offline. I’ve tried to raise my tolerance for longer discussions in recent years and the results are good. Let people debate for a while. Let team members reach an impasse and then help them move past it. The only time I recommend parking topics for later is if they just aren’t relevant to the group. In that case it makes sense. But if you find yourself getting antsy because the team is dwelling on a tough issue for a while, help them work it out instead of sending it to the parking lot.

14. Force fun

Nobody likes forced fun. It’s great to have team building activities and fun things to do during the offsite meeting but too many managers neglect to put themselves in the shoes of the attendees. Just because something is a barrel of laughs for you doesn’t mean it is for everyone else. My guiding principle for fun offsite activities is to choose simple things that create opportunities for people to spend quality time together. You want people interacting with each other and with team members they might not get to spend much time with on a regular basis. Activities that don’t allow people to actually talk e.g. sporting events or shows aren’t the best for this.

I hope you enjoyed my list of offsite Do’s and Don’ts. I’d love to hear some of the things that have worked (and not worked)

The lion’s share of coaching moments I have with managers of the teams I manage revolve around cross functional projects. Even if you’ve managed a hundred of them, they’re still really hard. I have to admit; I still struggle with them to this day. There is no playbook or guide or training that offers a silver bullet approach for leading people you don’t manage.

Here’s a classic example to illustrate my point:

A senior executive asks you and 3 other managers to take on an initiative and deliver in the next 30 days. It’s extremely important to the company and the stakes couldn’t be higher. They’re depending on you guys to deliver something great.

You get together, some sort of kickoff meeting takes place, and then things get tricky …

Who is really in charge?

Why did we all interpret the objective differently?

How do we resolve conflicts?

Whose priorities are most important?

What happens when we reach an impasse?

This same scenario repeats itself over and over again in every company in the world. It’s very similar to when you had to do group work in college. But the option of just doing all the work yourself isn’t viable in a global corporation. Plus, your career is at stake.

More often than not, cross functional projects tend to stall out or implode completely. Frequently they reach an impasse and the team feels like there is no other way to move forward other than to re-engage the senior leaders who gave the original direction. At some point the executives come in, see the project has not made good progress, break the impasse, and get the project moving again.

Many projects end up in this place, and it’s a bad one for the company and for your career. In the absence of legitimate organizational power, managers struggle to operate effectively. If your cross functional projects frequently degrade to the point where you need to bring in outside help from executives, you are basically advertising that you aren’t ready to be a leader yet. It’s bad for everyone involved.

There are many reasons why this happens. If you’re curious about power as a concept and want to dive deeper into the subject, I highly recommend The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene. You can also go to the original work on the subject and read about French and Raven’s Five Forms of Power. Here’s a short summary of that one.

For today, I’m going to offer 4 tips I use in projects and scenarios where I don’t have legitimate power. I hope they are helpful to you.

1. Make the Objective Your Source of Power

The tendency, when working on a cross functional project, is for each stakeholder to fixate on their own agenda. Most managers have a really hard time contemplating objectives that extend beyond the interests of their own team. The impact is they tend to lose sight of the bigger picture when participating in a project that spans many groups and functions. Each functional manager represents her own interests but the voice of the company is silent since the originating executive is no longer an active participant.

More often than not, it becomes apparent at the first progress checkpoint that the group has veered off course from the original objective. The executive sponsor needs to re-enter the equation and reset the objective. It’s an embarrassing outcome and makes all participants seem a little less competent as leaders.

When I’m working on a project with managers who are overly focused on their own agendas, I’ll abandon my own interests and represent the company. It’s really easy to do and can be a great source of power within the project team. By continually reminding the team of the higher level goal – the company’s goal – you can get the team to break away from their personal agendas and showcase yourself as the de facto leader.

My recommendation to managers is to drop your personal agenda in a multi team project. Be the voice of the company and let the higher level objective be your source of power.

2. Reject Passive Aggressiveness

Passive aggressive behavior will kill a project. Posturing, pandering, condescension, faux alignment. Multi team projects are ripe for passive aggressiveness. How many times have you been on a project team where the various managers won’t just say what they mean? The more visibility the project has, the worse it seems to get. Nobody wants to be seen as difficult or unsupportive. We don’t want it getting back to our boss or the sponsoring executive that we are an obstacle. So instead of debating and offering candid opinions, we speak in half-truths, we position and package, we hedge. The impact of passive aggressive behavior on a project team is that nothing gets accomplished. You leave meetings and pretend things are moving forward when they really aren’t. We agree to things … but not really. And then later we wonder why the project was unsuccessful.

I made a decision a long time ago not to be passive aggressive at work. I suggest you do the same and take it another step further. I explicitly reject passive aggressive behavior when I see it and I do whatever I can to force people to express their true feelings when I’m involved in a project. I frequently say things like:

Are you sure that’s really how you feel?

Does that really work for you?

I know you said you were ok with that, but isn’t there more to it?

I ask a lot of follow up questions and probe people to express themselves when I think they may be holding back to seem agreeable. And in so doing, I present myself as a leader even though I don’t directly manage anyone in the project. I am representing the project - not myself - by forcing people to be open and truthful and to deal with the hard issues instead of sweeping them under the rug or using back channels to resolve them.

My recommendation to managers is to be a vocal opponent to passive aggressive behavior. Call it out when you see it. Force people around you to be honest and forthcoming even when they may be uncomfortable doing so. It will showcase you as a leader and create better outcomes for the projects you participate in.

3. Be the Integrative Thinker

Project teams often get stuck debating an artificially limited set of options. How often do you find yourself arguing the merits of two possible approaches as though they are the only alternatives available in the universe? It’s either option A or its option B and we’re going to sit here and debate it until we come to a decision. I fight against this whenever I can.

Just about every week I find myself in a meeting with a group of people arguing one option over another. I make it a point to take a different approach. Whenever it makes sense, I try to offer a third approach nobody has considered. Doing so gives me great power even when I don’t directly manage any of the people on the project team. I’ll often ask a question like?

Are we sure there isn’t another approach we haven’t considered?

Why are we assuming it has to be A or B?

What if we did neither?

On the surface, these questions may seem to be obtuse or unproductive. But I find, in most cases, they can be the source for a breakthrough when a team has been overly focused on a fixed set of options. Reopening the conversation to entertain new ideas can be a real source of power since it reframes the entire process and pulls the team out of a rut. Integrative thinking like this is a skill possessed by most great leaders and is an important weapon to have in your arsenal. It’s something I specifically look for in management candidates I interview.

By playing the role of the integrative thinker on a project team you can take a leadership position even though you have no legitimate right to it.

4. Build the Project Framework

This one is a bit more tactical than the others, but its valuable nonetheless. When I’m operating on a project team, I try to take on the task of building the structure or framework for the ultimate deliverable. To be clear, I’m not talking about the project plan. I want no part in that. Managing the project plan is not leading, its supportive. I want to be the one building out the framework for the presentation or the strategy or the deliverable we’re working on. I want to build the basic story that others contribute into. I want to play the role of managing editor vs. contributor.

Two very positive outcomes arise from building the framework and acting as the editor. First, you assume control for the basic quality of the deliverable without having to be responsible for all the individual pieces of work inside of it. This means you can set yourself and the team up for success without killing yourself. The second benefit is that when you build the framework that others contribute into, you assume a powerful leadership role in the group even though they don’t report into you. The framework becomes your power.

My recommendation to managers participating in multi team projects is to volunteer to build out the skeleton or structure or framework for whatever you’re working on. I rarely get resistance to this. Then have someone else project manage the various contributions into it.

Becoming a great leader is a lifelong journey we all have to take. Leading is especially hard when you have no legitimate or organizational power over the people you’re trying to lead. I hope these tips will help you the next time you find yourself trying to be a leader on a cross functional project with a bunch of people you don’t manage directly.

>>> The multi team project is another perfect use case for a 30 60 90 day plan. If you haven’t picked it up already, I highly recommend grabbing my 30 60 90 day plan template for Managers. It’s got a ton of extra content in it from the generic template. It’s the perfect tool to create visibility and alignment for your projects, and ensure your boss and other stakeholders define success in the same way you do.

The worst thing you have to do as a manager is fire someone. To this day, I can't sleep the night before doing it. I take it very seriously and so should you. Anyone who says they like it or don't mind doing it is either lying or cruel. But sometimes, you have no choice. You've tried everything. You gave clear feedback. You offered to help. You did everything you could to make it work. Sometimes parting ways is the only solution left.

The moment you get fired is lonely and scary. This needs to be front and center in your mind when you deliver the news. You're sending someone home to have to tell their spouse, their friends, their kids, that they were terminated. They have to figure out how to pick themselves back up and start again. They have to find a way to earn a living. The stakes couldn't be higher.

Here are a few points to take with you the next time you have to let someone go:

1. First and foremost, be clear

The tendency is to let your own nervousness and emotions get in the way. You ramble. You try to sugar coat it. You try to spin it as a positive. Don't do this. The most important thing when terminating someone's employment is to be crystal clear. You can be sympathetic, but first you need to be clear. When I'm letting someone go I get right to it. I say something like "Bob, I'm really sorry to tell you but we are letting you go effective immediately." I pause to allow the person to take it all in - it can sometimes take a few moments. Its hard and its awkward but its absolutely vital to be clear and concise in delivering this news.

2. Offer your sympathy and support

The first time I had to fire someone I was too clinical. I was so focused on delivering the script that I must have seemed cold. The whole thing took 60 seconds. As I've progressed in my career, I've learned to offer clarity first and then take a moment to empathize and show my support. Even if the person you're terminating was a terrible employee by any objective measure, its still going to be one of the worst days of their professional lives. You owe them some compassion. Take a moment, once you've clearly communicated what is happening, to offer them your sympathy and support.

3. Make sure you have help

Terminating a person is hard and you should take help where you can get it. I almost always have an HR partner to support me in delivering the news. Its an emotional moment for everyone involved and the last thing you want to do is make a mistake in what you say or how you say it. You also want to be able to answer any questions the exiting employee has. Some managers try to do this all themselves but I think that is a mistake most of the time.

If you want to learn more about this subject, check out my comprehensive blog.

It seems I can’t go out for coffee anymore without someone talking to me about the crazy interview process they just went through. Puzzles, presentations, portfolios, psychometric tests. Not a new thing per se – even in 2013, almost 20% of companies reported using psychometric (aptitude) tests in the hiring process. I haven't found a current stat, but from what I observe, we certainly seem to be pouring it on as of late.

Let’s get one thing out of the way right up front. I don’t have anything against testing applicants to validate they can actually do the job once they’re hired. I’m all for it actually. I know how hard it is to predict how a candidate will actually perform on the job. As a hiring manager, I’m always searching for clues to see the real truth in candidates. I advise my coaching clients to proactively showcase their work and to build 30 60 90 day plans as a way of addressing this latent concern that lies in the mind of every hiring manager.

When it comes to the spirit behind aptitude tests in the recruitment process, I’m supportive. I get why we’re doing it. But in practice, things tend to get a bit weird. That’s what we’re going to discuss in this newsletter.

The question for this week: Should your interview process include an aptitude test?

Psychometric tests are rapidly gaining popularity in the hiring process. For those of you in the UK or Australia this will not be news. For those of us in North America, it feels like a more recent phenomenon. At least it does for me. Five years ago, you would hear about these things occasionally but these days they seem to be everywhere. Why is that happening?

The widespread adoption of aptitude tests seems to be driven by an overwhelming feeling that the competition for talent is heating up and that the cost of making poor hiring decisions has never been greater. We want to believe there is an answer to the frustrating conundrum recruitment seems to present. We hope there is a magical correlation to be found – an algorithm for hiring “A” players. Psychometric testing, in my opinion, is primarily a source of hope.

Imagine you were in charge of recruitment at your company and the CEO comes to you complaining that turnover is up and all the best talent seems to be heading to the competition. You need an answer. You need a strategy. You need to provide something that can be a source of hope. You need to give a reason why the CEO should have faith in you a little longer. Psychometric testing has all the attributes you need. It’s a tangible program people can see and touch and rally around. It’s interesting and scientific and seems like a potential source for competitive advantage. So we introduce it and it buys us a little time.

I realize this may seem like quite a cynical perspective. Surely there must be more to it. Isn’t there a bunch of data out there that proves the value of psychometric testing in the hiring process?

When you google “psychometric tests for hiring” and “aptitude tests for hiring”, you get two kinds of search results. 90% of the articles that come up are from providers of psychometric tests – the people selling the tests. The second kind of search results are courses on “how to ace a psychometric test”, essentially a parasitic community of vendors selling a solution to the very challenge the community created in the first place. It’s a racket. This is only one data point to be fair, but I do worry much of the momentum around aptitude testing in the hiring process can be attributed more to the marketing of the providers than to the realized benefits of actual companies.

There is data out there that points to benefit of applying certain kinds of aptitude tests in the hiring process for specific types of roles and industries. I will grant that. But I believe the primary driving force behind the widespread move to psychometric testing is fear, not provable ROI. We are afraid of not having an answer to an extremely hard question. We’re afraid of admitting the challenge of hiring is infinitely complex and daunting, and so we put our faith in this shiny object instead of addressing the hard truth.

Perhaps there is a universe of good data to refute my perspective. I haven’t been able to find it. If you’ve had great success with aptitude tests, I’d love to hear about it. I’m not unmovable in my position and certainly my number one interest as a hiring manager is to improve my ability to hire the right people. But for today, I’m going to share the top three reasons I’m highly skeptical about the value of psychometric testing in the hiring process.

1. There is no single profile for success

My experience tells me there are an infinite number of ways to be successful. That there is no one recipe for success within a company. There is no magic set of attributes. I have seen leaders with wildly different approaches and skills be equally successful. As I’ve written previously, my belief is that the only wrong way to lead is to be inauthentic. And that you can find success in many ways as long as your starting point is your authentic self.

I’ve seen great leaders who are directors. They start with a goal and direct people to execute. I’ve seen great leaders who are facilitators – truly collaborative. I’ve seen great marketers whose perspective is rooted in creativity. But I’ve seen equally great marketers who are driven almost exclusively by data and science. I don’t believe there is a single profile for success.

Surely there are attributes common among leaders and successful people and that some level of testing might reveal them. I won’t debate that. But what worries me is when we start making marketing applicants take math tests. When we start making engineers prove their presentation skills. When we do that, I fear we’ve taken a step too far. There may be some value in the spirit behind aptitude testing but our interpretation and practical application of it is far too narrow in my opinion.

2. We mistakenly assume it’s optimal to replicate attributes of “successful” people

In theory, you can test all your highest performing employees and mine the data to find common attributes that correlate to success. Then seek out new recruits who share these attributes. In theory this can work. But I would argue this is mostly based on a flawed premise i.e. that the people who have had success at your company possess the attributes you want to replicate. In my experience, at least half of the top executives and most “successful” people in a company are incompetent. And, that the path to success, as I discuss in Stealing the Corner Office, is frequently not determined by talent or hard work, but rather a unique set of career advancement skills.

You may think I’m being cynical again, but I’d ask you to look around your executive boardroom and ask yourself how many of these people are truly talented and got there on merit, and how many got there for other reasons. My point is not to discount successful people entirely but rather to call into question the scoring system we use to identify those whose attributes we’d seek to replicate in an aptitude test. If 50% of the successful people in your company are ruthless, political animals … are you sure you want to replicate their attributes in your future hires?

3. Aptitude tests are too abstracted from reality and can be gamed

Many people, when faced with an aptitude or personality test, will change their behavior to perform well on the test itself. Every time I am faced with a test like this I have an internal dialogue about whether or not I should answer truthfully or in the manner I think they would want me to answer. It’s hard to blame someone for thinking this way. It’s easy to be tempted to answer in a way that is inauthentic since the outcome of the test is directly tied to our future wellbeing. These tests can never get the truth because the stakes are too high for the applicant.

There is also an entire industry built around passing these tests. Every week another site pops up promising to help users “ace the aptitude test”. The entire thing is becoming a farce.

It’s not just the subjective parts of the test that are problematic either. The objective components are also too abstracted from reality in my opinion. Unless you are building customized skills tests for each role you’re hiring for, I think you’re in trouble. Since most companies can’t afford to do that, they adopt generic aptitude tests to test for logical reasoning, verbal skills, math etc. The problem is, this is so abstracted from the actual nuances of working in a job in a real corporation, it becomes almost meaningless.

I am not fundamentally opposed to the premise behind psychometric testing in the hiring process. I agree with what it’s trying to do. I am always looking for ways to better predict how an employee will actually do on the job. I give assignments, I look at work samples, I do what I can to improve the probability of a successful hire. And while I understand how we’ve arrived at this point - where aptitude tests grow more widespread with every passing quarter - I think we need to slow our roll a bit. Before you jump in with both feet, I recommend asking some tough questions about your assumptions and expectations for adding aptitude tests to your hiring process.

I'm often surprised by the wide variance in the salaries people earn in similar positions and at similar companies. The higher you go up in the corporate ranks, the wider that variance seems to become. I think there is a misconception among job seekers that salary ranges for common positions are tighter than they really are.

I frequently see candidates for the same job e.g. Director of Product Management, with nearly identical qualifications and backgrounds, demanding salaries that are separated by 30% or more. To me, this underscores the importance of solid research and negotiation at the offer stage. Here are 3 quick points to help you get the best deal possible.

1. Don't let your personal value of money cost you

Too often, candidates settle for too little because they assign value to money as an individual instead of as a corporation. Yes, ten thousand dollars is a lot of extra money to you. But its not a lot of money to a company. Companies think much more in terms of value for money vs. absolute dollars. Remember that when you're afraid to ask for a little more.

2. Be the first one to ask about the budgeted salary range for the position

If they ask you first, you're already at a disadvantage because you have to give a number without any information. Just make sure when you ask, you do it tactfully. Ask the HR person or recruiter vs. the hiring manager whenever possible. If you are forced to go first, give a wide range. Say something like, I'm looking for a total compensation package between 50K and 70K depending on the mix of base, bonus and equity components. This approach gives you the best chance of getting the maximum amount the company is willing to pay.

3. Do your homework and adjust upwards

Its pretty easy to find salary ranges for most companies and most positions on the web. Glassdoor and others make it really easy. My recommendation is to research the salaries for positions similar to yours at various companies similar to the one you're going to work at. Then add 10% - 20%. This gives you the best chance of getting the best deal without pricing yourself out of contention. Even if you're a little high, hiring managers generally won't rule you out.

If you want to read more about salary negotiation, check out this comprehensive blog I wrote a while back.

I used to roll my eyes when people talked about building a personal brand. Images of Kardashians bounced through my head. I was wrong ... mostly. You don't need to become the next YouTube star or post Instagram selfies, but you do need to develop a reputation as a leader in your field. In the long run, as I have come to realize, this will pay dividends for you in job search, salary and your ability to get things done at work.

The thing about building a brand is that it takes a really long time. You have to start now, keep at it, and then one day, a year or so from now, you'll see some results. Its hard to do because it involves a lot of up front investment (in time) before you see a return. You should do it anyways.

Here are a few quick tips for building a personal brand without becoming a Kardashian.

1. Start a professional blog

A big reason I've gotten my last two jobs was that my prospective employers visited my blog and could see I was a true expert in my field. This can mean the difference between landing your dream job and not. Even if you're at the beginning stages of your career, trust me ... start blogging about it. You'll be shocked at how quickly you can get a following and start building up a strong professional brand. Blog about your profession, about the discipline you're passionate about. It presents you as a thought leader which has real value.

2. Fix your LinkedIn profile and get active on social

At the very least you need to invest some time in your LinkedIn profile. Its where all recruiting happens now. If you're waiting until you're in a job search to update it, you're making a mistake. Fix it now. I also highly recommend getting active on Twitter or in LinkedIn groups for your profession. I realize can feel like a burden, especially when you're busy, but its worth it. Start tweeting once a day -- follow some popular people and hashtags for your profession and retweet some stuff. And keep at it. It will pay off.

3. Teach something

This is a great one. There are so many awesome platforms now including teachable, udemy, coursera, youtube and others. Teaching something related to your profession is an excellent way to present yourself as an expert and leader. It also forces you to brush up on your skills, which in and of itself has benefit. Post something, teach something, give advice. You'll be happy you did.

If you want to see the tools I use to build my own personal/professional brand, you can check them out here.

A lot of your performance at work is determined by the fundamental mindset you take with you into every interaction. If I was to point to one secret weapon I use in just about every business interaction I have, it would be "tactical empathy". I wrote a blog it earlier this year and I defined the term as follows:

If you missed that blog and want to learn more you can find it here. In it, I walk through three ways to improve the way you communicate by purposefully applying empathetic thinking. In today’s blog I’m going to focus more on how I actually apply this advice in specific work scenarios. My hope is when you find yourself in these situations you’ll remember this advice and have the tools to improve your performance.

The overarching rule – the advice I received – is to start every interpersonal work situation by assuming the other person’s (or group’s) perspective. Most of us walk into work (and life) situations with our own perspective as the predominant context. The lesson is, if you start every interaction by adopting your counterpart’s mindset and context, you’ll end up with much more positive outcomes.

Far too often we go into meetings, presentations, one on one’s with our boss, and we focus on our agenda. We talk about our goals, our priorities and later wonder why the other party never fully embraced it. We often leave the interaction feeling great and then wonder three weeks later, why the other person seems to have forgotten it. Does that sound familiar?

Here are a few other classic situations that indicate you’re probably too focused on yourself and not enough on your counterpart:

In your weekly one on one with your boss, she doesn’t seem to pay attention

Your boss rarely remembers what you’re working on and needs constant reminders

You deliver plans to other teams but they never really embrace or take action on them

You tell your staff members what you expect of them but they just don’t seem to listen

Surely some of these sound familiar to you. I see them all the time. We all do. But most of us blame the other party instead of ourselves. In my experience, this all stems from an overly self-centered focus. It’s a mistake I try to avoid at all cost. More often than not, when people seem to not understand or to forget or to not fully embrace, it’s because you have failed to present the information using their perspective. Whether you realize it or not, you tend to project your own priorities and context on them and then wonder why they aren’t embracing it with enthusiasm. Don’t fall into this trap.

Here are three specific examples, from my experience, where you can take the other person’s perspective first, and see immediate benefit.

Updating Your Boss

A large percentage of the questions I get from coaching clients and subscribers revolve around how to better communicate with a manager. In my own professional life, I observe staff members and colleagues mishandling one on one meetings and management updates all the time. I hear things like:

I can’t get my boss to pay attention to what I’m doing

My boss didn’t care about this for two months and all of a sudden its urgent

I don’t think my boss has any idea what I’m working on

I thought I was doing great work, turns out my boss doesn’t agree

These are all variations of the same problem. It’s really easy to blame your boss for not understanding or not paying close enough attention to your priorities, but in my experience you should start by looking inwardly. The former approach is just too passive. Most of the time there are specific things you can do differently to present information to your boss in a way that will make her care, make him take notice.

My recommendation is to start all updates and one on one meetings with your boss’s perspective in mind. What does she care about most? What are his objectives? How must she be feeling? How does he like to consume information?

Far too often, employees take a very self-centered perspective when presenting information to a manager. They send way too much information. They speak in technical terms that aren’t easily related to priority business goals. They speak about activities instead of outcomes. They present problems instead of alternative solutions. Before you go into your next one on one with your boss, try to relate what you’re doing to her priorities. Create your update or report using a context he can relate to. Focus less on expressing yourself and more on helping your boss understand and appreciate.

Saying "No" to People

This is always a tough one, and depending on what part of the organization you work in, it can be a big part of your life. Learning to say “no” is one of the most difficult skills to develop. I get a lot of questions about the right way to “push back” or how to “learn to say no”. All of us want to be helpful. Saying “no” creates anxiety in us. We don’t want to build a reputation for being difficult. We don’t want people to perceive us as poor team players. So we tend to just say “yes” and then do whatever we can to deliver. The problem with that, in my experience, is you end up working on too many things, your quality suffers, and in the end you develop the very reputation you were trying to avoid. Then the question becomes, how do you say “no” more often without putting your reputation at risk?

The answer to this question, as you may surmise, starts with adopting the other person’s perspective. The first thing I do when I need to say “no”, is to acknowledge the validity of the request and express that I genuinely want to help them. I’ll say things like:

“I can tell how important this is to you, and I really want to help you accomplish your objective.”

Once I’ve demonstrated that I’m taking their perspective and want to help them, I try to provide a view into my perspective so they can develop empathy for me just like I’ve done for them. I’ll say something like:

“What you may not realize, is that my team is focused almost exclusively on three priorities right now; X, Y and Z. And as a result, we’re over-capacity. So I think we’re going to need to get creative in how we go about helping you.”

What I find, when I approach saying “no” in this way, is that more often than not the other person is happy to brainstorm alternative approaches or timing. At the very least they leave our encounter feeling positive in the sense that they know I want to help them but just can’t do it exactly how they had envisioned.

Saying “no” is never easy. There is no magic solution to make it positive. But when you approach it by starting with the other person’s perspective and creating an empathetic exchange, you can, at the very least, ensure they will leave the encounter feeling positively about you. This will preserve your reputation even when you can’t accommodate every request.

Working on Multi-departmental Projects

Projects taken on by a single team almost always seem to be more successful than projects taken on by multiple teams working together. Maybe that sounds obvious to you. Unfortunately, in a company, it’s not a scenario you can avoid. Just about every large transformational project requires cross functional cooperation. It’s like the group work you did in college … you hate it, but you have no choice.

Quite honestly, I dreaded group projects in school. My temptation was just to take over and do as much of the work myself as I could. But that strategy is flawed. It might work in a University class where you’re producing a relatively simple product, but it fails at the scale of a complex enterprise.

The secret to working more effectively with other teams in my experience, is to put yourself in their shoes right from the outset. At the beginning of the project you should spend less time expressing yourself and more time trying to understand their perspective.

What do they stand to gain from this project?

What does success mean to them?

What are they afraid of?

Once you’ve had an honest exchange of perspective, and it’s all out on the table, you’ll find teams start working more collaboratively and less competitively. They’ll share information more readily. They’ll be more helpful. They’ll be more conscious of your needs since you are more conscious of theirs. This may sound more like couples counseling than career advice, but it’s been extremely effective for me.

Taking the other party’s perspective is one of the best pieces of career advice I’ve ever received. I apply it to every aspect of my work and personal life. Negotiation, relationships, projects … it has endless applications. I hope you give it a try and let me know how it works for you.

Multi-tasking is a trap. I am convinced of it. For a long time, we glamorized multi-tasking. We put it on a pedestal as a business virtue to be proud of. Many people still do. But I have come to learn over the years that while multi-tasking can masquerade as an effective approach to management, in reality it does not scale.

One common trait I’ve observed in all the teams I’ve managed is a natural inclination to take on too many parallel projects. It seems to be a fundamental challenge faced by all complex teams and multi departmental companies. I see it on smaller teams too. You may be able to get by for a while as a multi-tasker or by running a multi-tasking team, but it has rapidly diminishing returns in my experience.

You don’t have to work for very long in a corporate setting to see how many different activities and projects are being pursued at any given time. Many of which have little or no impact of significance on the most important outcomes the company is trying to affect. How many projects have you seen recently at your company that never got finished? How many were partially executed but had muted results? How many activities are you asked to support that just seem so disconnected from what the company is really trying to achieve? I see this everywhere and I spend a great deal of time and energy trying to fight against it.

When I look back at the most successful leaders I’ve worked with, most of them were obsessive about finishing things. They were myopically focused. They seemed to have a unique ability to focus in on one thing while chaos surrounded them. They seemed immune to the volume of requests and input that sought to distract them from their most important priorities. Early in my career I wondered from afar if this was a weakness. I know now, with the benefit of experience, that it was a strength.

This lesson has had bearing both on how I manage my career and on how I manage teams. In my career, I force myself to stay absolutely focused on pursuing big wins … one at a time. I really don’t do anything else. This level of focus, to be fair, comes at a small cost I’m willing to pay. I’m really bad about checking email. I decline meetings all the time. I block off huge chunks of my calendar every week. I frequently let lower priority tasks dwindle and dither and die. It’s a calculated price I’m happy to pay in order to pursue the big, measurable wins I think will have the biggest impact on the company and my career.

I use the same approach in managing my team. I try to help them dramatically reduce the number of activities they pursue at any given time. In my experience the 80-20 rule applies well to teams. Ask yourself, what projects did you work on last year that were mentioned in your annual performance review this year? What moments do you think your boss really remembers? What initiatives did you participate in that made a big impact on the most important objectives your company is pursuing? Now ask yourself, what else did you work on? How many activities did you perform that no one will remember? How many meetings did you attend that amounted to nothing?

If you’re anything like me, you can probably point to just a few projects that were truly transformational for the team and a ton of other stuff that if viewed objectively, only served to distract you. My goal as a manager is to cut as much of that out as I possibly can. In many ways, this is the single biggest piece of value I can offer my team: The freedom to focus. The time to focus. The pursuit of focus can actually be a pretty scary thing for a team. Focusing on one thing means not focusing on other things and that comes at a price. Saying no to people and projects is hard. Saying yes is much easier. My job as a manager is to make it easier to focus, to reward and support it.

In my experience, the “one thing at a time” mentality, even when applied to multi-functional teams, is the best approach for actually executing high quality initiatives from start to finish. When it comes to actually delivering big things, with quality, I have found no better approach. The other option, the one I observe to be rampant in corporate life, is to pursue many activities in parallel. My experience tells me this results, more often than not, in a bunch of moderately successful or half-finished projects, many of which are disconnected from the top priorities of the business.

Teams are healthiest and happiest when they have a clear purpose and the autonomy to pursue that purpose creatively. There is extensive research by Kenneth Thomas and others to support this contention. When your team is managing too many projects simultaneously, that clarity of purpose is obscured. They no longer have the time to put their full energy into pursuing anything. Quality suffers. Engagement suffers.

My advice to managers and career minded individuals is to start focusing on fewer activities. Start trying to rally your team around one big thing at a time. The volume based approach doesn’t work. Finish projects. Work them obsessively until they are done with quality. Don’t allow the inevitable noise and pressure to distract you. Even if you manage a team of 20 or 40 or more, you can do this. Focus, at this level, will lead to higher impact programs, happier staff, and bigger wins for the business and for your career.